Chapter 11

In this light another curious fact about the village boys gains in significance, supposing it to be indeed a fact. From the nature of the case, proof is not possible, but I have a strong impression that, excepting to go to the town, the boys of the village rarely, if ever, stray into neighbouring parishes, or more than a few hundred yards away from their parents' homes. One exception must be noted. In the lonely and silent fir-woods, which begin in the next valley and stretch away over ridge and dell for some miles from south-east to south-west, one sometimes comes upon a group of village children--little boys and girls together--filling sacks with fir-cones, and pushing an old perambulator to carry the load. But these are hardly voluntary expeditions; and the boys are always very small ones, while the girls are in charge. The bigger boys, of from ten to thirteen years old, do not go into the woods. They play in the roads and pathways, or on the corners of unused land, and as a rule within sight or call of home. I have never seen any of them, as I have occasionally seen middle-class boys from the town, rambling far afield in the outlying country, and my belief is that they would be considerably scared to find themselves in such unfamiliar scenes.

Assuming that I am right, yet another contrast presents itself. It was in this very neighbourhood that William Cobbett, as a little boy, played off upon the huntsman that trick of revenge which he bragged about in after-life. For five or six miles across country, over various streams, through woods and heaths and ploughed upland fields, he made his way all alone, dragging his red herring, perfectly confident in himself, never at a loss to know where he was, but thoroughly familiar with the lie of the land most suitable for his game. Of course, not many boys are Cobbetts. Yet many of the village boys, even now, would be his match at other games. For here, on the shelving sand-banks beside the stream, I have seen them enjoying rough-and-tumble romps like those which the little Cobbett lived to think the best part of his education; and they do it with a recklessness which even he can scarce have surpassed. But in getting about the country they do not so much as begin to emulate him. Of course, it is true that now they have to spend their days in school; true, too, that the enclosures of land throughout the neighbourhood have made wandering less easy in our times; nevertheless, within a few miles there are woods and heath-lands in plenty for adventurous boys, as those of the middle-class are aware; yet those of the village never risk the adventure. I can but infer that they are afraid of something, and a moment's thought discloses what they fear. Just as in meddling with my nut-tree, so everywhere they are in danger of trouble with people of the propertied or employing kind; and behind these people stands the policeman, and behind the policeman that dim object of dread called "a summons." This it is that keeps the village children within the bounds familiar to them, where they know who is who, and what property belongs to which owner, and how far they may risk doing mischief, and round what corners they may scamper into safety.

The caution they display is not unnecessary. Somehow, middle-class boys do not get into trouble with the law; but it happens not infrequently that a few little villagers are "pulled up" before a magistrate for trivial acts of mischief, and if the worst punishment inflicted upon them is a shilling fine and costs, which their parents pay, that is enough to make "a summons" a very dreadful thing to a little boy. Out of eighteen shillings a week, his father cannot afford "a shilling and costs" for a piece of mischief, as the little boy is but too likely to be shown.

Children's memories are short, however, and it takes more than an occasional punishment of two or three to inspire in them all a timorousness so instinctive in character as that of these village boys. At the back of it there must be a more constant and pervasive influence. And, to come to the point at last, I think that the boys are swayed, unwittingly, by an attitude in the grown-up people with whom they live--an attitude of habitual wariness, not to say fear, in regard to everything connected with property and employers. This is what makes the timidity of the village urchins interesting. We may discern in it the expression of a feeling prevalent throughout the cottages--an unreasoned but convinced distrust of propertied folk, and a sense of being unprotected and helpless against their privileges and power. Here, accordingly, is one direction in which class distinction has seriously affected the villagers. It would be an exaggeration to say that they feel like outlaws; but they are vaguely aware of constraint imposed upon them by laws and prejudices which are none too friendly to people of their kind. One divines it in their treatment of the village policeman. There is probably no lonelier man in the parish than the constable. Of course he meets with civility, but his company is avoided. One hears him mentioned in those same accents of grudging caution which the villagers use in speaking of unfriendly property-owners, as though he belonged to that alien caste. The cottagers feel that they themselves are the people whom he is stationed in the valley to watch.

They feel it; nor can it be denied that there is some excuse for the feeling. It is true that they far outnumber the employers, so that, other things being equal, from their more numerous ranks there would naturally come a larger number of offenders against the law. But other things are not equal. The proportion is not kept. Anyone who studies the police-court reports in the local papers will see that, apart from cases of technical offence, like riding a bicycle on the footpath, or keeping a dog without a licence, practically all the proceedings are taken in defence of the privileges and prejudices of the employing classes against the employed classes. Clearly the village idea is not wholly wrong. In theory, the policeman represents the general public; in practice, he stands for middle-class decorum and the rights of property; and what the people say is roughly true--there is one law for the rich, and another for the poor.

But it is only roughly true, and one must get it a little more exact to appreciate the position in which the labouring-folk stand. I am not disposed to say anything here against the administration of the law by the justices, when offenders are brought before them; but in the choice or detection of offenders I must point out that a great deal of respect of persons is shown. Remember what that old man said, who would have liked to see the fir-woods go up in flames: "'Tis all fenced in, and now if you looks over the fence you be locked up for it." That was an exaggeration, of course--a sort of artistic licence, a piece of oratory; yet for him the assertion held more than a grain of truth. The case is that of the two sorts of boys over again. Where a middle-class man may take his Sunday walk securely, risking nothing worse than being civilly turned back by a game-keeper, these village men dare not go, unless they are prepared to answer a summons for "trespassing for an unlawful purpose," or "in search of game." Let it be admitted that the unlawful purpose is sometimes proved; at least, the trespassers are occasionally found to have rabbit-wires concealed about their persons. The remarkable thing, however, is that they should have been searched in order to make this discovery. The searching may be legal, for all that I know; yet I do not seem to see a middle-class man--a shopkeeper from the town, or any employer of labour--submitting to the process, as the cowed labouring man apparently does. It will be said that the middle-class man is in no fear of such an outrage, because he is not suspect. But that is conceding the greater part of what I wish to demonstrate. Rightly or wrongly, the labouring man is suspect. A distinction of caste is made against him. The law, which pretends to impartiality, sets him in a lower and less privileged place than his employers; and he knows it. In alleging that he might not look over a fence without being locked up for it my old acquaintance merely overstated a palpable truth. People of his rank--cottage people, labouring people--do, indeed, not dare to wander in country places anywhere off the public roads.

Much more might be said on the same lines. Whether inevitably or no, at all events it happens that the march of respectability gives, to regulations which may be quite proper in themselves, a very strong appearance of being directed against the poorer working people. No doubt it is right enough that the brawling of the "drunk and disorderly" on the highroads should be checked; the public interest demands it; yet the impression conveyed is that the regulations are enforced more for the pleasure of property-owners than anybody else; that, in fact, middle-class respectability has, so to speak, made this law especially with a view to keeping the working classes in order. I am not urging that in this there is any substantial grievance; the offence is rarely committed by others than labourers, and by them too often. Yet it is well known that, while a labourer roystering along the road is pounced upon and locked up, an employer the worse for drink is shepherded home from his hotel by the police, and the affair hushed up. From circumstances like these--and they are very common--a suspicion is bred in cottage people that they are not in good odour with the authorities. The law rather tolerates than befriends them. They are not wanted, are not regarded as equal fellow-citizens with the well-to-do, but are expected to be quiet, or to keep out of sight. English people though they are, yet, if nobody will employ them so that they can pay rent for a cottage, they have no admitted rights in England--unless it be to go to the workhouse or to keep moving on upon the public road. In endless ways the sense of inequality is impressed upon them. I opened the local paper lately, and read of four of our young labourers accused of "card-playing." The game was "Banker," the policeman told the magistrates--as if gentlemen were likely to know what that meant!--and he had caught the fellows red-handed, in some as yet unfenced nook of the heath. That was how they were in fault. They should not have been playing where they could be seen, in the open air; they should have taken their objectionable game out of sight, into some private house, as the middle-classes do--and as, I suppose, the policeman himself must have done in his time, since he knew the game. Unfortunately for the labouring men, they have no private house available: there is no room for a card-party in their cottages; and thus they become subject to laws which, as they do not touch the property-owner, seem designed to catch especially them. For another example of the same insinuation of inequality, consider the local by-laws, which now forbid the keeping of pigs within a considerable distance of a dwelling-house. I will not say that the villager thinks the regulation a wrong one; at any rate he understands that it is excused in the interests of public health. But he also knows that it has been introduced since the arrival of middle-class people in the parish. They came, and his pigs had to go; so that in his eyes even the general public health looks like the health of rich residents rather than of poor ones.

The people display little resentment; they accept their position with equanimity. Nevertheless it drives them in upon themselves. Observing the conditions, and yielding to them as to something inherent in the nature of things, they strive to keep out of the way of the superior classes. They are an aloof population, though not as their ancestors were. They are fenced out from the country; they cannot with security go into enclosed wood or coppice; they must keep to the public way, and there they must behave so as not to disturb the employing classes. Accordingly, all up and down the valley they restrict themselves more and more soberly to their gardens and cottages, dreading few things so much as a collision with those impersonal forces which seem always to side with property and against people like them.

XIII

NOTICE TO QUIT

It might be thought that at least when they are at home the people would be untroubled; yet that is not the case. Influences from the new civilization reach them in their cottages, and the intrusion is but the more searching for being impersonal.

It is borne in upon the senses in the shape of sights and sounds proclaiming across the valley that the village is an altered place, that the modern world is submerging it, that the old comfortable seclusion is gone. Even the obscurity of winter nights does not veil that truth; for where, but a few years ago, the quiet depths of darkness were but emphasized by a few glimmering cottage lights, there is now a more brilliant sparkling of lit-up villa windows, while northwards the sky has a dull glare from new road-lamps which line the ridge on its town side. As for the daytime, the labourer can hardly look from his door without seeing up or down the valley some sign or other telling of the invasion of a new people, unsympathetic to his order. He sees, and hears too. As he sweats at his gardening, the sounds of piano-playing come to him, or of the affected excitement of a tennis-party; or the braying of a motor-car informs him that the rich who are his masters are on the road. And though the man should go into his cottage and shut the door, these things must often have for him a sinister meaning which he cannot so easily shut out. There is a vague menace in them. They betoken to all the labouring people that their old home is no longer quite at their own disposal, but is at the mercy of a new class who would willingly see their departure.

Perhaps the majority do not feel themselves personally threatened; nevertheless, the situation is disquieting for all. Before the property-owners came, and while still the population was homogeneous, a sort of continuity in the life of the valley impressed itself upon one's consciousness, giving a sense of security. Here amidst the heaths a laborious and frugal people, wise in their own fashion, had their home and supplied their own wants. Not one of them probably thought of the significance of it all, or understood how the village traditions were his inheritance; not one considered what it meant to him to belong to the little group of folk and be independent of the whims of strangers. Yet, for all that, there was comfort in the situation. To be so familiar as the people were with the peculiarities of the valley, to appreciate the usefulness of the wide heath-land, to value the weather, to comprehend at a glance the doings of the neighbours, and to have fellow-feeling with their motives and hopes and disappointments, was to be at home most intimately, most safely. But all this is a thing of the past. To-day, when the labourer looks around, much of what he sees in the new houses, roads, fences, and so on, has, indeed, been produced by his own handiwork, but it is a product in the enjoyment of which he has no share. It has nothing to do with him and his people; on the contrary, it announces the break-up of the traditional industries by which he lived, and the disintegration of the society of which he was a member. It follows that a certain suggestiveness which used to dignify the home pursuits of the village is wanting to them now. Instead of being a part of the general thrift of the valley--a not unworthy contribution to that which, in the sum, was all important to the village life--those little jobs which the labourer does at home, including his garden-work, have no relation now to anything save his private necessities, because now the dominant interests of the valley are those of a different sort of people who care nothing for such homely things. I shall be told that, after all, this is mere sentiment. But, then, half the comfort of life proceeds from those large vague sentiments which lift a man's private doings up from meanness into worthiness. No such enrichment, however--no dim sense of sharing in a prosperous and approved existence--can reward the labourer's industry in this place at the present time. The clever work which, in the village of his equals, would have made him conspicuous and respected, now stamps him as belonging to the least important and least considered section of the population.

Still, I will waive this point. Assuming--though it is much to assume--that the cottagers have no sentiment in the matter, there are other circumstances in the change which cannot fail to disquiet them. I hinted just now that the "residential" people would not grieve if the labouring folk took their departure. Now, this is no figure of speech. Although it is likely that not one cottager in twenty has any real cause to fear removal, there has been enough disturbance of the old families to prove that nobody is quite safe. Thus, about two years ago, when some cottage property near to a new "residence" was bought up by the owner of the residence, it was commonly said that he had bought it in order to get rid of some of the tenants, whom he disliked for neighbours. Whether or not that was the real reason I do not know; but certain it is that two of the tenants were forthwith turned out--one of them after twenty-five years of occupancy. It was not the first case of the kind in the village, nor yet the last. At the present moment I know of three families who are likely ere long to have to quit. They live in a block of cottages just beyond the hedge of a substantial house--a block which, it must be owned, is rather an eyesore from there, but which might easily be turned into a decent villa, and is actually up for sale for that purpose. And the dwellers in the substantial house are fervently hoping that a buyer of the cottages will soon come forward. They have told me so themselves. "Of course," they say, "we shall be sorry for the poor people to be turned out, but we should like to have nicer neighbours, of our own sort." So in their own valley these English people are not safe from molestation. With scarce more care for them than would be shown by a foreign invader, gentility pursues its ungentle aims. No cottager can feel quite secure. A dim uncertainty haunts the village, with noticeable effect upon everybody's activities. For a sort of calculating prudence is begotten of it, which yet is not thrift. It dissuades the people from working for a distant future. It cuts off hope, benumbs the tastes, paralyzes the aspiration to beautify the home which may any day have to be abandoned.

And in the long run this effect, from which all the people suffer more or less unconsciously, is more injurious than the actual misfortune of having to move, which, after all, falls upon the few only. Not that I would make light of that calamity. Men under its shadow lie awake o' nights, worrying about it. While I am writing here, in a cottage near at hand there is a man under notice to quit, who is going through all the pitiful experiences--wondering where in the world he shall take his wife and children, fearing lest it should have to be into some backyard in the town, dreading that in that case he will be too far away from his day's work and have to give it up, and scheming to save enough, from the cost of bread and boots, to pay for a van to move his furniture. It is not for any fault that he is to go. And indeed he is being well treated; for the owner, who wants to occupy the cottage himself, has waited months because the man cannot find another place. Nevertheless he will have to go. As a rule, a man under notice to quit is in the position of standing by and seeing his home, and his living, and the well-being of his family sacrificed to the whim of a superior whom he dares not oppose; and I do not dream of arguing that that is a tolerable position for any Englishman to be in. None the less, it is true that these acute troubles, which fall upon a few people here and there, and presently are left behind and forgotten, are of less serious import than the injury to the village at large, caused by the general sense of insecurity.

The people's tastes are benumbed, I said: their aspirations to beautify their homes are paralyzed by the want of permanence in their condition. To make this quite plain, it would be only needful to look at the few cottages in the valley still inhabited by their owners, and to compare them with those let to weekly tenants. It seems to be no question of income that makes the difference between the two. In several cottages very well known to me, the owners are not earning more than fifteen shillings a week--or, including the value of the cottage, twenty shillings; yet the places, in their varied ways, all look comfortable and comely. Fruit-trees, or grape-vines, or roses, are trained to the walls. The boundary hedges are kept well trimmed; here and there survives a box border--product of many years of clipping--or even a yew-tree or two fancifully shaped out. Here and there, too, leading to the cottage door, is carefully preserved an example of those neat pavements of local stone once so characteristic of this countryside; and in all these things one sees what the average cottager would do if it were worth while--if he had the heart. Since none of these things, however, can be had without long attention, or, at any rate, without skill carefully bestowed in due season, you do not find such things decorating the homes of weekly tenants. The cottages let by the week look shabby, slovenly, dingy; the hedges of the gardens are neglected, broken down, stopped up with anything that comes to hand. If it were not for the fruitful and well-tended vegetable plots, one might often suppose the tenants to be ignorant of order, degenerate, brutalized, materialized, so sordid and ugly are their homes.