A Breath of Country Air: Henry Williamson Collections, #5

By Henry Williamson

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, remains best known for his nature stories set in North Devon, the much-loved classics Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. Between 1937 and 1945 he farmed 243 acres of difficult land in North Norfolk, bringing a near-derelict farm to an A grade classification during the years of the Second World War. Throughout those years he was writing newspaper articles, to help finance the farm. The 82 essays contained in A Breath of Country Air – originally published in two volumes in 1990-91, now gathered in a single e-book – bring together Williamson's weekly pieces in the London Evening Standard, written during 1944 and 1945. They are broadly concerned with day-to-day happenings on the farm, featuring particularly his two young sons Rikky and Robbie, together with other reflections on country life. Further pieces poignantly describe the end of Williamson's farming dream, with the sale of the farm and auction of implements and the family's move 60 miles south to Botesdale, in Suffolk. The book concludes with a 15-part serial, 'Quest' (originally published in Women's Illustrated magazine in 1946) which records the period immediately after the move. Richard and Robert Williamson – Rikky and Robbie – have written the Forewords; Richard remembers these stories 'as a video of my beautiful years, faithfully recorded . . . I can with the greatest clarity smell the new ploughed fields, hear the owls, and see the little grey Ferguson on those far away fields of the Norfolk farm'; while for Robert, after the move to Botesdale, 'being away at school, the holidays were greatly enjoyed, and Henry has captured the mood of these holidays, now that the strain of the farm had gone'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henry Williamson
• Release date: Aug 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781873507537

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

Foreword

by Richard Williamson

It is extraordinary for me to read these old stories of Henry’s, written in 1944-5. They are as a video of my beautiful years, faithfully recorded. Such is the skill of his recording that I can with the greatest clarity smell the new ploughed fields, hear the owls, and see the little grey Ferguson on those far away fields of the Norfolk farm. Many events I had apparently forgotten until this re-reading forty-six years later.

The reader was shielded from the irritable and querulous side of what were in fact very dark years, though many may have guessed that life was not as happy as the stories sometimes suggested. However, I like to think that for Henry these little adventures were the happiest of his hours in that period, as they were for Robert and me. Because we were, as he says, naive enough not to be affected by his temperament, neither had we a serious work role on the farm as had mother and the other children, we were able to enjoy a unique symbiosis. Henry entered again the magical world of the child through us and he showed us much more than we could see by ourselves.

Nowadays I feel much closer to him again, knowing more about how he felt. It is sometimes with sadness enough to make me weep, to read these pages. I remember the sledging expedition ‘White Streamline’ but only now have any idea how he worried that he might let me down by being unable to attend.

It is good to meet again old characters like the priest who ‘shot down’ the Doodle-bug on the marshes. Father Bruno Scott-James ended his days in Naples courageously rescuing orphans off the streets and sheltering them in his hostel. The R.A.F. pilot was George Mackie, a hero to us all as he flew his Flying Fortress at a hundred feet over the farm. He is now a retired publishers’ consultant and his other career as an artist flourishes. Recently Windles and I met him at his home in Stamford where he showed us his flying log book that included visits by bomber to the farm (though with no mention of one engine stopped to please us children!). The ‘silver glinting specks’ are a portent of The Phasian Bird to come 5 years later. And there was Micky the Virgil reader, Henry’s nephew Michael Busby who became a priest in Australia. The Alvis Silver Eagle has reappeared latterly on a Radio 4 broadcast on its 60th birthday celebrations. Eric the cat, ‘litter by litter,’ lived until 1952 when she was run over in Suffolk. I have read again of those wretched yew planks, too, which loaded up for the return journey to Devon ten years after they had arrived in Norfolk, never quite made it into the dream house but were sold back to the original owners.

The house in Botesdale, Suffolk, was sold in 1950 when Henry finally returned to Georgeham to begin A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. The farm is now on its fourth owner since 1945. Lord Buxton has retained its original buildings (which are in use as habitation) and also the old field boundaries. The old meadows which Henry ploughed up have either reverted to grassland or been planted with osiers. The woods and many original trees are still there, and the marshes of the coast are one of my favourite places of all to revisit. Only the faintest remnants of wartime remain, the occasional rusted shell from the bofors range, a fragment or two of barbed wire. But the wild geese have returned after forty years’ absence.

Henry’s farming adventure has been well chronicled already in several books. This is probably the closest, within its scope, to reality, for the essays were dashed off at the last minute for the newspaper with little time for reflection and none for correction or adding, the two little boys waiting with their running plimsolls laced for the sprint up Stiffkey street to the post van at half past four in the afternoon.

1990

Introduction

A Breath of Country Air is the complete collection of articles, essays and stories written by Henry Williamson for The Evening Standard during 1944 and 1945. It was originally published by the Henry Williamson Society in two separate volumes, to spread the cost of printing. This e-book edition allows its publication as a single volume.

The series began while Henry Williamson was in his seventh year of farming 235 acres at Stiffkey, on the North Norfolk coast. His exhausting struggle to bring the derelict farmland back to good heart was told in The Story of a Norfolk Farm (Faber, 1941). A Breath of Country Air forms a coda to that story, as by the end of 1945 the farm had been sold, dreams unrealised. In these pages the farm is an ever present backcloth to vividly sketched vignettes of the countryside, local characters, and his growing children – especially Rikky and Robbie.

After nearly fifty years it is difficult to recall the wider context in which the series was set: only undertones of war are detectable. Yet outside the microcosm of the farm the war was reaching its climax, as readers of The Evening Standard would have been only too well aware from the nightly headlines. At the beginning of 1944 round-the-clock bombing of Germany, now reaping the whirlwind indeed, was front page news, with the U.S.A.A.F. attacking targets such as Schweinfurt and Regensberg by day, and the R.A.F. mounting huge raids by night. In Italy the slow, mud-clogged progress of the Eighth Army had been halted at Cassino, while the Americans were in serious trouble at the Anzio beachhead.

Reading these newspapers today, not yellowing and fragile, but brightly white on microfilm in a darkened reading room at the British Library’s Newspaper Library in Colindale, their stories from the battle fronts, of mass air battles, ships mined or torpedoed, and always the casualties, bring the war suddenly very close, and have a shocking immediacy. Reeling through, glancing over every page as it moves across the screen, I come upon Henry Williamson’s first article in the issue for Monday, 14 February – St Valentine’s Day. The next day I read of the destruction by bombing of the fourteenth century Benedictine monastery built on the crest of Monte Cassino.

The year progressed. The war in the air and news from Italy were pushed firmly from the front pages in June of course, by the Allied landings in Normandy, a momentous endeavour referred to only obliquely by Henry in his piece the following week. Thereafter The Standard’s headlines followed the advance of the Allied armies across Europe: the hard-fought battles around Caen; the liberation of Paris in August; September, the airborne landings at Eindhoven, Nijmegen and, disastrously, Arnhem; the drive for the Rhine, reached in November; and at the end of the year, the Germans’ desperate counterattack through the Ardennes, popularly dubbed ‘The Battle of the Bulge.’

And throughout, every Monday, like a still small voice of sanity, Henry’s weekly feature, ‘A Breath of Country Air’ – which came to me, as it must have done to thousands of Londoners at the time, as precisely that.

John Gregory, 1990; revised 2013

So the farmers are making fortunes!

We – my four small sons and I – are now in our seventh season of farming, five of them wartime, two of them in the depressed years immediately before the war.

In 1944 I can scarcely believe the interest that people have in the land and in farming. A publisher tells me he could sell twice as many books on farming and the land that he can print; and he publishes several new books every season. Even so, I am sceptical of the fundamental genuineness of this war-time interest.

This scepticism is general among farmers, especially among those who have a life-feeling for their land, who have been brought up to it. For them the war is but an interval between one dispiriting period in the immediate past, when so many were near-ruined, and the fear of another dispiriting period after victory.

But things are all right to-day, surely? With the growing incoherency that farming puts on a man, for his own protection against disappointments, I can reply, Yes, they aren’t so bad. H’m, like all farmers, making a fortune on the quiet? Nothing ever satisfies you fellows! reply the worldly-wise.

Are some people, then, making money at farming? Yes, some people have done very well indeed. For example: Two hard-working men in the West Country, who before the war had a 400-acre farm rented for ￡300, most of it grass. They had a herd of cows and they depended on milk. They employed one man and a boy. Perhaps they cleared £3 a week for themselves, each of the two brothers.

To-day, they still have a herd of 40 cows and sell milk. They employ regularly one man, one boy and a Land Girl. Over 300 of their acres are now arable, growing corn. A combine-harvester cuts, threshes and sacks the corn, all in one operation. The corn is sold, to eager merchants, almost before it is cut. One man on the tractor, another on the combine-harvester; the boy and the girl on another tractor and trailer picking up the sacks – that’s all their labour at harvest.

Now it has been worked out that two men on a combine-harvester, with two others to pick up the sacks of corn as they are dropped off, do the work of 28 men in the ordinary way of cutting the corn with reaper-and-binder, setting up the sheaves into shocks, picking up the sheaves when ripe, loading them into wagons, taking them to the stack, unpitching them, building them into a stack; then, when the threshing machine comes later in the year (by rotation), taking off the thatch, putting three men on the corn stack, one man to sack-up corn as it runs from the spouts, one man to cut the string of the sheaves, one man to feed the cut sheaves into the drum, another to sack up chaff and caulder (a dirty job: eyes, ears, nose, hair all clogged), two men to load full sacks on to cart, one of them to cart them to the barn to tip out, another to fetch water and coal for the threshing engine – it eats eight hundredweight of coal a stack and drinks 4000lb. of water – and three men to weigh and put-up corn into regular four-bushel sacks again, ready for the lorry to take it to the maltster or miller.

In all, a lot of work, taking 28 man-days; and then, over five months of winter, a terrific amount of labour to cut the straw-stacks again, to load the straw into carts, take it to the bullock enclosures, spread it for litter, for bullocks to tread into muck which has to be carted out again in due season to manure the ground to grow the corn again.

When Mr. Hudson* talked a few weeks back about the profit he made from his barley, many of us farmers wondered if he had a combine-harvester. It does make an immense difference in the net profit per acre.

Our two hard-working West Country men, astute opportunists, are doing very well in their wartime farming, judged both by money and the wartime necessity to get grain out of the land. Their labour bill is exceptionally small, and they are obviously making a packet.

After harvest they plough the straw-scattered stubble; in the spring they cultivate the ploughland and drill artificial fertilisers with the seed-corn; they reap the crop later on, sell it, and their harvest is done for another year.

For perhaps four years they can do that, and get away with taking corn crop after corn crop; then what happens? One year the corn looks bad; it is thin, the heads are mouse-ear. The fertility of the soil is gone.

Grass the fields down, run cows over them to graze, and so gradually to bring back fertility. But cows don’t bring back fertility; the goodness leaves the farm forever in the form of milk. You can’t get out of the land what you don’t put into it.

So the two farmers, having made their packet, decide to clear out while the going is good, and to live on the interest of their money at Torquay or Ilfracombe; perhaps buying two boarding houses, cheap, ready for the post-war holiday boom.

Yes, but what about the impoverished land? The landlord will have to let the next tenant have it rent free for at least two years; for the land has been exploited, or robbed.

The normal labour for a 400-acre farm is about 14 men, whose work for five months of the year is unproductive. But with those 14 men, each a sturdy father of children, the land is being farmed; a bit of England is being kept in good heart.

February 14, 1944

* Minister of Agriculture

The land is coming into heart again

I have experienced the contented feeling of a man standing on a bit of land which was said to grow nothing, to be a waste of money to try and crop it, but on which he has grown a grand crop of corn.

There is a field at the end of my farm which slopes down to a valley called the Lower Hanger. Our county of Norfolk is subject to what the natives call tempests. When the rain lashes down on the Hanger it runs in rivulets, and as the tempest increases the rivulets become little torrents down the steep slope, sometimes carving a bed a foot or more wide and several inches deep.

If you look in the beds of these miniature water-bournes when the storm is blown away, and it is dry again, you will see that the middle of them is overlaid with sand. The sand is heavier than the mould, which has been washed down the hill.

During many years the mould of the Lower Hanger had been washed out of the soil, eroded. In parts the chalk was exposed, further along the ridge the yellow clayey subsoil was hard and barren. Seed corn drilled there produced only small, scanty, mouse-ear stuff. The Lower Hanger did not pay to cultivate.

As Mr. Ronald Duncan, in his new and most amusing book, Journal of a Husbandman, suggests, it is better for an amateur to start with a derelict farm and work upwards than for him to buy a good farm and go downwards.

The Lower Hanger, declared an expert, walking there with me one morning, had not grown a good crop in years; if I wanted to lose money in trying, well, that was my affair.

How about compost put on that land, I asked. He said he had no experience of such things. He was a big farmer, one of a long line of farmers who had survived agricultural depressions by, among other things, not trying to crop poor land!

Beyond the adjacent field, called Higher Hanger, there was a five-acre wood called Fox Covert. A few oaks and pines and sycamores grew there, with a thick undergrowth of nettles and elderberries – those weeds among trees. They grew out of a rich leaf-mould. Why shouldn’t I take the tractor there, pull out some of the elderberries, plough up the leaf-mould, and then cart it off and spread it on the Lower Hanger? As for the nettle roots they would soon dry and die in the wind. Anyway, we could sling them out as we loaded the rubber-tyred tumbrils. It was pleasant working in the wood, which was a hundred feet above the sea, with views over miles of marshes where the wild geese flew and, in summer, hundreds of acres of sea-lavender gave them the colour of the pale East Anglian sky.

We got the mould out in heaps, and then spread them, on four acres of the bad land. When spread, the mould – a compost of decayed leaves, twigs, and sometimes a rabbit’s bone – looked to be no thicker than a mere peppering, of black pepper, on a Yorkshire pudding.

It was too late to plough it in, the land was dry enough already, and a turned furrow would soon lose any moisture, in that brick-like earth. I wanted to drill oats and peas there, for feeding in winter to young bullocks and horses.

It was a Saturday afternoon, my four sons there, ranging from 16 years to seven. We had two tractors. With the duckfoot cultivator tines behind the first, I stirred up the yellow earth, only an inch or two deep, thus mixing the leaf-mould with the moist yellow soil.

Behind me, one boy walked with Blossom, the old mare, drawing the light one-horse roll, to make a nice tilth; and behind him came the other tractor, drawing the seed-drill.

As soon as I had finished stirring the soil with the cultivator, I hitched on the harrows, and so began the work of covering the seed from the sharp and knowledgeable eyes of rooks and pigeons. We finished at eight o’clock, having had half an hour off for tea. And was it a success!

The oats came up and never looked back, growing into big plants, with blue-grey stems and leaves. The pea plants were strong too. At harvest the oat-sheaves were thick, the straw of a fine golden-brown colour, the heads heavy with corn.

Thus in the first year the cost of spreading the mould there was paid for, by the yield.

This spring we are taking barley from the Lower Hanger, undersowing the corn with clover and grasses, for a hay crop in 1945. The meadows are below, and with an electric fence to keep the cattle from straying. I shall let the beasts wander there when the hay is off, to graze the aftermath, and drop the dung from the meadow grass below.

The Lower Hanger used to give me no feelings of happiness; but to day I enjoy the view the better, because I am standing on land that is coming into heart again.

February 21, 1944

This bird makes the farmer happy

A kestrel flying off a post in the fence of the meadows in a straight line away, gave me the pleasurable sight of his brown sharp wings, the streamline of his pinions.

I was glad that one of these little mousehawks was back on my farm. Perhaps this bird was the mate of the kestrel which was shot two years ago when, to my anger, I found the corpse lying in the wood, near the shelter of a pigeon shooter.

I gave permission to several men to shoot in the woods, on the evenings of Wednesday and Saturday, to help reduce the number of pigeons.

These birds annually migrated from Scandinavia, sometimes in flocks of thousands. The pigeons ate cabbages and the plants of clover; they pecked the tops of turnips grown for winter sheepfeed. They were vermin.

The idea in the Eastern Counties is to organise pigeon shoots, twice a week, at a time when the birds are thinking of flighting to their roosts in the woods. It is no good one man going by himself; the pigeons have to be kept on the move, while guns placed at tactical points, hidden in shelters of branches, shoot one, or two, as the flocks prepared to settle.

If one of the woods is vacant the birds settle there, while the shooters grow colder and colder in their hides, waiting for the canny birds who know a safe roost when they find it.

My kestrel used to live in an ivy-clad tree at the edge of the Entries wood. He and his mate nested there spring after spring. Often I saw them hovering over the adjacent field, watching for mice, beetles, butterflies, and perhaps partridge chicks. That was the reason why kestrels were shot: partridge chicks.

Norfolk is the home of wild game; there is a great tradition of game-shoots in the county.

Owing to the dry climate the pheasants and partridges are numerous, because the little birds in spring can travel without getting their hind-claws weighted with clay.

In a wetter climate this often happens; and one finds a wee, cold chick left behind, dying beside a clod, its eyes closed in weariness, overcome with the struggle to keep moving. Lift it up, and you see that the slender hind-toe of each foot has perhaps a twentieth of an ounce of brown clay on it.

One by one the chicks die off; at midsummer only two or three are left out of a hatching of 20 eggs.

The natural enemies of mice are weasels and the kestrel or windhover. The brown hawk leans on the slightest breeze, adjusting its pinion feathers to the uptrends, billowing itself on the shifting weights of the air.

So skilful its balance, the bird can hang in one place, its full dark eyes directed below, for a minute at a time. It may be watching a beetle crawling below, a daddy-long-legs, or a mouse. Suddenly it drops and seizes its food.

But in Norfolk the kestrel is outlawed. Big farmers shoot in the season sometimes five days a week, each killing five or six thousand head of game, or more, between October and January. No mercy for the kestrel!

Without weasels and mousehawks, mice increase enormously. I had an oatstack near the Entries wood, standing from August of one year to March of the next.

When we threshed that stack thousands of mice were leaping about the yellow sheaves being pitched into the threshing drum. Scores went through the drum, dropping out small, grey corpses, into the grain sacks. We reckoned when we made the stack that there were 200 sacks (1½ cwt. of grain to a sack) in it. When we threshed it we got only 140 sacks from the spouts of the threshing machine. Sixty sacks, or 4½ tons, of good oats had been eaten by the little beasts!

All during the threshing we were knocking them off our clothes. As for the rats, they had been driven away by the multitudes of mice. There wasn’t a rat in the stack.

Before the war farmers of East Anglia, the unwanted granary of England, were so hard put to make ends meet that they existed chiefly on their game, letting their shoots to syndicates of rich city men. So kestrels, weasels, and every other bird or beast which took an occasional game-bird were nearly exterminated. Thus the woods were overrun with mice and rats.

My small farm lies in the midst of the big shoots; but I like it to be a sanctuary for hawk and weasel.

This is unpopular; but I am glad when I see the mousehawk on the post. So is my small son, whose passion is birds.

We hope to hear the whistle of the windhover in the spring over the fields and meadows, and to see the old birds flying, mice in claws, to the nest in the ivy-clustered ash-tree.

February 28, 1944

Can dogs think?

One of those clever men who talk brilliantly about the mental limitations of birds and animals was telling me the other day that dogs were creatures of automatic reflex action; that no dog could think, as thinking was understood in human terms.

He classed dogs with all other animals, and quoted some experiment about a dog’s dinner, the ringing of a bell announcing the arrival of the dinner for several days in succession; then the dinner arriving without the bell, and the dog just sat still and hadn’t the wit to eat the dinner.

From this the scientist proved that the dog had no power of thought at all. There was the dinner, and there was the hungry dog ignoring the dinner, since the accustomed bell, stimulating its automatic reflex actions, had not been rung.

Let us apply for a moment this brilliant reasoning to human life as we know it.

A visitor from Mars, a clever scientist, observes that lights shine in a city street after sunset; that taxicabs prowl, and at a whistle, wheel round and stop at the kerb, while an individual of homo sapiens enters and is driven away.

The Martian scientist proves that, when the lights do not go on, and the taxicabs do not stop for any number of whistles or alternative cries of Taxi! Taxi! that the drivers are animated only by automatic reflex action. The drivers pass by the whistles and the cries, and proceed empty in the darkness.

The other day I went to a hare drive in Norfolk. Over one hundred hares were shot. These creatures abound in our district, and they do much damage to sugar-beet crops, to clover fields and to growing corn.

So the hares are shot. Men who shoot them often take dogs with them, to pick up the shot hares.

What would our scientist think of a dog that sat quietly by his master’s feet, while six hares lay out within a radius of forty yards of him? The dog did not move; until the master lifted a finger, when it bounded forward, and retrieved one after another of the hares.

At the other end of the line was another dog. And what a dog! Obviously something was wrong with it, for it acted by no automatic reflex action. On the contrary, during the shooting it rushed all over the field, turning the hares away from the line of guns, driving them back towards the line of beaters. Whistles, curses, shouts, roars, oaths, all were unavailing.

It was a strange hairy dog; and it ended up by fighting one of the trained retrievers, and eating half the hare the retriever was carrying to its master.

What does this prove? That the obedient dog was well-trained (like the dog who would not touch the dinner until the bell rang), and the other mongrel did his own thinking apart from the wishes of its master.

His master, by the way, got a rope and tied his dog to it and then fastened the rope round his own waist.

Even so, the dog had its own ideas of sport, and since his master would not come along in the chase of hares over the clover field, the dog did a bit of dragging. Eventually he dragged his master into the river, and both went home in disgrace.

We have a bell to announce dinner in our farmhouse parlour. We have four boys sitting down to dinner soon after the bell rings.