I have been very busy lately working on a campaign to stop the export of elvers from the River Severn. Perhaps you might consider adding your signature?
https://www.change.org/p/stop-export-of-baby-eels-from-uk-to-russia
I am also working on an ecological memoir called ‘The Eel Trap’ which I hope will appeal to my readers on Substack. To whet your appetites here is the first chapter. I would love to know if it reads like the start of a book you might enjoy?😊
Chapter 1
Someone has to lift me to see over the hedge when the hullabaloo of the fox hunt goes by but I can’t focus. That there is a view of fields and woods beyond the hedge is such a surprise that before I can focus the hounds are clamouring out of sight in the hop-yards, and what makes the greatest impression is that the world is so big. The village roads were hedged and enclosed, although our tied cottage was on the same rise as the church, so I could see, down below the house, the row of pigsties, cleaned by my big warm sunburned father and whitewashed for the hop-pickers to live in. I could see the place where they stuck the pigs and rolled them in the fire, and I could hear them screaming as if their gears were being stripped. If you hear a pig killed you never forget it. Cows die meekly but pigs do not. I could hear the squeak-squeak of the wind pump and the calls of the gleanies[1] on the farmhouse chimneys as I lay in bed, and the blackbirds’ time-to-roost calls.
If I was out at night, holding my father’s hand that smelt of hops and hessian and binder twine and John, I could see the Universe and the Milky Way and hear the crickets in the hedge and the singing of the telephone wires buzzing down the poles. So much, like that sudden view over the hedge, was too huge to comprehend, so small things somehow belonged to me because we shared the smallness. The Apricot tree my father planted akin to the stable gable was small, and therefore mine. Which was why, as I passed one day which felt like July, so I was probably four, the supposition that this small tree was mine suddenly seemed to mean that I must be Me, very small, on the path there in my short pants and striped T-shirt, stopped by my consciousness of my own consciousness, aware for the first time that I was separate and alone, myself and no-one else. A terrible moment of awareness I have since busied myself in hiding from, with limited success. Between that moment and our leaving that tied cottage for another farm was not more than a year, but that sharpened awareness may have been what solidified some memories of this extraordinary place that had been being exceptionally ordinary for hundreds of years.
All the men in the hamlet worked on the land, living with their aproned wives in dark cottages that smelled of oil lamps and dampness, with vegetables and chickens and pigsties all around, and useful lengths of timber stored leaning up against the damson trees. Everyone was a farmer or a farm worker apart from the teacher and the miller, and the vet who came in a little pony trap. In the school yard we played fox and hounds or farmers, some of us being sheep and some dogs, and a big lump of a boy the farmer.
The village, deep in the Herefordshire heavy clay hop-ground, had been enclosed quite late, the Enclosure Map of 1838 detailing how all the plough lands, meadows and commons shared by the peasants were to be parcelled up and hedged into fields owned by individuals. From that moment the villagers were either landowners or, mostly, day labourers, converted thus by a wrenching greedy dislocation whitewashed as agricultural improvement. Peasants were turned into labourers, working in the newly-hedged and private fields where the commonality of the open village fields had been, striving to keep their families out of the hated workhouse.
The people who worked the land in my childhood had not lost all of the spirit of the peasant, though they had jammed it together with their anger at the world that they had lost, somewhere inside their labourer’s waistcoats and flannel-union shirts, and poaching, like the rick-burning of the past, was a kind of guerrilla war against the landowners. Lanky slouchy lads with whippets had some glamour in those parts.
The countryside had grass snakes and hedgehogs that my father could bring home to show us, the snakes coiled inside his shirt. There were swallows, and cuckoos, peewits and curlews, flycatchers and yellowhammers, and even skylarks. All these have been utterly farmed out of my village now, scarcely 20 miles away. Farms were tough places to work then, and there was a mixture of manpower and embryonic mechanisation that could make life even harder and more dangerous, as sheaves and pikefuls of hay and straw were replaced by machine-made bales almost too heavy to lift. My father hurt his back building a rick, trying to keep up with the stream of hay coming up the new elevator and too proud to tell the men below to stop their bucolic joke and send the hay up at a pace that he could deal with. And so he went to work on a fruit farm where the work was lighter. Mr Coleman, who made his living taking farm livestock to and from the market in Hereford, washed most of the cowshit out of his cattle wagon and sprinkled some Jeyes Fluid. We packed our bits of furniture among the fumes and set off for a new life twenty miles and at least a century away.
The new farm was run by an army colonel, who had bought it with his demob money after the war. He knew nothing about any form of farming although his family were landowners. In the 1940s and ‘50s governments were keen to boost food production in case the U-boats unexpectedly came back, and retired officers with nothing much else to do were growing apples all around us. During the war government advisers had pressured farmers to bring more land into food production and increase crops by using chemicals. These advisors continued after the war and supported the colonels and majors to plant apple trees, to apply handsome quantities of three artificial chemical fertilisers, as if all the soil needed was enough nitrogen, potassium and phosphate compounds, and to spray the apple trees at regular intervals with poisonous chemicals. The machinery of war, the explosive and nerve gas factories, had been easily repurposed to serve a growing market for chemically-similar fertilisers and pesticides, driven not by farmers but by governments and chemical companies and voiced in the farming press and on the Archers. This was the weapons of war turned on the countryside, the birth of the new farming that has left the countryside a pretty corpse.[2]
There was a new school for us, a two-mile walk away into this new century. The play in the schoolyard here was not farmers and fox and hounds, but jets, tanks, shells and racing drivers. I had thought tanks were for storing paraffin for oil lamps and that shells were what snails lived in and thrushes cracked on their stone anvils. We had arrived at a village where the children had access to comics and to electricity, and so to television. We had also arrived at a farm where we were the working class and the Colonel and his wife were the aristocracy. It was as if we had relived the enclosures, moving from a fairly egalitarian rural community to one where the distinction between the aristocratic landowner and his working class employee and working class children was stark, because there was no-one else living on the farm, no-one to blur the lines. We were not allowed to walk past the low front of the Colonel’s walled garden in case we spoiled their privacy.
Of course we escaped the orchards, ringed with wire rabbit fences like a military camp, and found some better countryside, where the old apples varieties in ancient orchards weren’t bloomed with spray residues, and there were winding cattle-paths through gorse patches and the huge blossom-towers of old perry[3] pear trees, a stream we could dam and a hanging wood where we were the day shift and the badgers the night. But already some farmers were bulldozing hedges and filling ponds. The big buccaneer farmers were creating 80-acre fields, and spraying their crops from airplanes.
Living on the orchard, we rubbed the poison off the apples onto our jumpers before we ate them. We explored the pond-life and the badger setts and I became a keen birdwatcher. But the contrast with the old place seeded a sense that the status quo was not necessarily so, and that there might be other ways of living on and in the land. Boys’ adventures stories told of countries where excitingly dangerous animals lurked. Already I was wondering why we had so few wild creatures, and consoling myself with the thought that the beautiful red[4] and white Hereford cattle were a substitute for the herds of buffalo in the Wild West stories, and the wolves of those adventure tales were now dogs, so that we lived in a more harmonious kind of Eden than where the beasts were wild. I was more aware of class and landed wealth too, living next door to a Colonel and his wife who effortlessly patronised and humiliated my parents by their mere presence and instinctive condescension.
My father had a range of skills more typical of a peasant than of a modern man, who might need only to do a single job, buy some white goods and mow a lawn or two. John – my father - could make wonderful things and he could draw and paint. He could explain how a triple-expansion steam engine worked, show us how to read a map or sharpen a wood-chisel. He could plough and he could lay hedges, and awestrike me with talk of the ineffability of a night sky where we were seeing light that had set out billions of light years ago from stars that might not now exist, walking hand in big warm hand along dark roads with the crickets and the telephone wires singing in the hedges beside us, so lost and lovely. The telephone wires will never sing again, and maybe not the crickets either, though much later I found telephone wires that still sang in the West of Ireland. My father connected the world I had first seen and the world I saw now, a country man with many of the skills and attitudes of a peasant, but the acuity to be able to see that the splendid illustrations of nature’s wonders sent free in a massive public relations campaign by the Shell Chemicals Company[5] to all the schools were a kind of memorial to the world they intended to destroy. And in spite of trying at school to be like everyone else, to pass exams and get the odd scholarship, I was somehow never going to let myself be recruited into doing what everyone expected. My sense of direction had been pre-set in that peasanty old village, and it survived being schooled and colleged and the expectation that a boy who could pass examinations could ‘do well’.
In the grammar school one day we came across the concept of the peasant. Peasants were only mentioned because of the peasants’ revolt, though they seemed to still exist in other parts of Europe. In those days when suddenly defying authority was in the air, the idea of the peasants revolting was intriguing to us. The history master made his annual joke about the peasants being particularly revolting in 1381, and the word peasant entered the slang of our group in a mainly derogatory sense. But because I was both the son of a farm worker and a fairly smart operator when it came to undermining the authoritarianism of the school, I acquired the nickname Pez, short for Peasant, as a tribute to my skill at subverting authority as well as a slur on my father’s place near the bottom of the social ladder.
In spite of the poor pay of a farm worker, our parents had a genius for inspiring their children. John once took my brother for a week on a dig on Salisbury Plain, converting him immediately into an archaeologist and eventually a professor. Another time they saved enough to take us by bus and ship and train for a week in Baile na nGall in the Kerry Gaeltacht[6]. I realised that although the corncrakes and the peasants had been eradicated in the vanishing hay meadows of England, both these threatened species were still not quite extinct in the West of Ireland, nor in the Scottish Highlands. So as soon as I was old enough I packed my rucksack, stuck my hitch-hiker’s thumb out and set off to look for them.
What exactly I was looking for I was not sure. I expected peasants to be authentic in some way, an authenticity derived from belonging to a place, having their needs met in that place and having a visceral connection to the land that fed them. I expected them to know some of the history of their home place, preserved in place names in their language. I expected their musicians to release, as you might a dove, a music quietly stored, memorialising people long dead and linking the generations so that it flowed through dancing and the celebrations of birth and marriages and deaths and the craic in cottages and bars of an evening before being put carefully back as one might a fiddle in its case. I expected people with my father’s quiet confidence that he could make what he needed or find someone who would show him how. I expected, in short, a people radically different from most of the people all around me.
I had of course come across the deeply troubling concept of ‘folk’ which was in some sense produced by a search for a peasant authenticity, that had been used across Europe to verify the modern peasant-free nation state. In England the authenticity of folk singers and Morris dancers was deeply, almost catastrophically flawed, though that did not stop me from buying a little squeezebox and going to the local folk club. That search for the authentic led on to the music of the blues singers and sharecroppers of the Deep South, American country blues singers like Muddy Waters or Leadbelly, much more authentic in itself but losing most of its authenticity in its journey over the Atlantic to a folk club in Hereford. I sensed that the nearest place where this mysterious authentic authenticity might be found was in the West of Ireland and maybe in the Gaelic speaking fragments of the Scottish Highlands. My search, not quite yet articulated even to myself, was for musical, cultural and ecological alternatives, and contained a feeling that our notion of continuous and inevitable progress needed not to be uncritically accepted. For the peasant time is circular as the seasons go round and are marked by the arrival of the corncrake and the cuckoo, by haymaking time and pig-killing. This time is not linked to progress as is the time of the modern farmer watching his business grow year by year. The peasant cares about his home and that his home place provides stability, food and employment for his family. What we might see as lack of ambition is actually an ambition to live within the bounds and the resources of the place. The change from peasant farming to what – there is no alternative – we must call capitalist farming, contained within it a future countryside drained of its biodiversity by a small class of entrepreneurs, and inhabited by villagers with no deep connection with the countryside, which was to become eventually merely the background to walking the dog. The peasant acceptance that life involves physical work and sometimes hardship and discomfort might have translated in modern times into an understanding that to sustain life on the homestead or the planet ease and comfort are not human rights.[7] In peasant –based society ease was created for the landowners by the labour of the peasants. In ‘modern’ society the ease and comfort we thought we deserved were to be borrowed from the future of the planet. I thought there was a need for a peasant aesthetic that engaged, through work and through making, with the natural world, that valued the delicious state of the tired body at the end of a day of haymaking, that disdained labour-saving gadgets made as the result of soul destroying factory work, in favour of a different sort of work, where to use your body to grow things and make things yourself was valued more than the work done to enrich others and impoverish the worker.
[1] Guinea fowl
[2] Some of the new pesticides had started life as Nazi chemical weapons. Nitrogen fertilisers are easily turned into explosives, as the IRA discovered.
[3] A kind of cider made from special perry pears unique to the three counties of Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester
[4] Country people use red and blue for farm animal colours where city folk might say brown and grey.
[5] Shell Chemicals launched an extraordinary campaign of posters of the natural world sent to primary schools, alongside the Shell Guides encouraging people to take motoring holidays. My father prophetically saw the posters as a memorial to the natural riches the new pesticides of the chemical industry had started to destroy.
[6] Near Dingle.
[7] I am often accused of romanticism when I suggest that the extermination of the peasants was a profound loss. I know enough from my own childhood to understand a little of the hardship that was sometimes part of being a peasant, as well as understanding what damage the eradication of the peasants has done to our attitude to life, to work and to nature and the damage it has done worldwide to the environment, where the British Empire imposed our attitudes to land on people who could not otherwise have imagined it was possible to own land.
If peasants had a hard life, that of the labouring poor into whom they were transformed by the enclosures was probably worse. Court record of the 19th century are full of prosecutions of former peasants and their children stealing firewood or handfuls of beans from the land they had recently farmed.