A Clergyman's Daughter Page 12

and keeping it alight. They were hiding in a beech wood, under a

  squat, ancient tree that kept the wind away but also wetted them

  periodically with sprinklings of chilly dew. Nobby, stretched on

  his back, mouth open, one broad cheek faintly illumined by the

  feeble rays of the fire, slept as peacefully as a child. All night

  long a vague wonder, born of sleeplessness and intolerable

  discomfort, kept stirring in Dorothy's mind. Was this the life to

  which she had been bred--this life of wandering empty-bellied all

  day and shivering at night under dripping trees? Had it been like

  this even in the blank past? Where had she come from? Who was

  she? No answer came, and they were on the road at dawn. By the

  evening they had tried at eleven farms in all, and Dorothy's legs

  were giving out, and she was so dizzy with fatigue that she found

  difficulty in walking straight.

  But late in the evening, quite unexpectedly, their luck turned.

  They tried at a farm named Cairns's, in the village of Clintock,

  and were taken on immediately, with no questions asked. The

  overseer merely looked them up and down, said briefly, 'Right you

  are--you'll do. Start in the morning; bin number 7, set 19,' and

  did not even bother to ask their names. Hop-picking, it seemed,

  needed neither character nor experience.

  They found their way to the meadow where the pickers' camp was

  situated. In a dreamlike state, between exhaustion and the joy of

  having got a job at last, Dorothy found herself walking through a

  maze of tin-roofed huts and gypsies' caravans with many-coloured

  washing hanging from the windows. Hordes of children swarmed in

  the narrow grass alleys between the huts, and ragged, agreeable-

  looking people were cooking meals over innumerable faggot fires.

  At the bottom of the field there were some round tin huts, much

  inferior to the others, set apart for unmarried people. An old man

  who was toasting cheese at a fire directed Dorothy to one of the

  women's huts.

  Dorothy pushed open the door of the hut. It was about twelve feet

  across, with unglazed windows which had been boarded up, and it had

  no furniture whatever. There seemed to be nothing in it but an

  enormous pile of straw reaching to the roof--in fact, the hut was

  almost entirely filled with straw. To Dorothy's eyes, already

  sticky with sleep, the straw looked paradisically comfortable. She

  began to push her way into it, and was checked by a sharp yelp from

  beneath her.

  "Ere! What yer doin' of? Get off of it! 'Oo asked YOU to walk

  about on my belly, stoopid?'

  Seemingly there were women down among the straw. Dorothy burrowed

  forward more circumspectly, tripped over something, sank into the

  straw and in the same instant began to fall asleep. A rough-

  looking woman, partially undressed, popped up like a mermaid from

  the strawy sea.

  ''Ullo, mate!' she said. 'Jest about all in, ain't you, mate?'

  'Yes, I'm tired--very tired.'

  'Well, you'll bloody freeze in this straw with no bed-clo'es on

  you. Ain't you got a blanket?'

  'No.'

  ''Alf a mo, then. I got a poke 'ere.'

  She dived down into the straw and re-emerged with a hop-poke seven

  feet long. Dorothy was asleep already. She allowed herself to be

  woken up, and inserted herself somehow into the sack, which was so

  long that she could get into it head and all; and then she was half

  wriggling, half sinking down, deep down, into a nest of straw

  warmer and drier than she had conceived possible. The straw

  tickled her nostrils and got into her hair and pricked her even

  through the sack, but at that moment no imaginable sleeping place--

  not Cleopatra's couch of swan's-down nor the floating bed of Haroun

  al Raschid--could have caressed her more voluptuously.

  3

  It was remarkable how easily, once you had got a job, you settled

  down to the routine of hop-picking. After only a week of it you

  ranked as an expert picker, and felt as though you had been picking

  hops all your life.

  It was exceedingly easy work. Physically, no doubt, it was

  exhausting--it kept you on your feet ten or twelve hours a day, and

  you were dropping with sleep by six in the evening--but it needed

  no kind of skill. Quite a third of the pickers in the camp were as

  new to the job as Dorothy herself. Some of them had come down from

  London with not the dimmest idea of what hops were like, or how you

  picked them, or why. One man, it was said, on his first morning on

  the way to the fields, had asked, 'Where are the spades?' He

  imagined that hops were dug up out of the ground.

  Except for Sundays, one day at the hop camp was very like another.

  At half past five, at a tap on the wall of your hut, you crawled

  out of your sleeping nest and began searching for your shoes, amid

  sleepy curses from the women (there were six or seven or possibly

  even eight of them) who were buried here and there in the straw.

  In that vast pile of straw any clothes that you were so unwise as

  to take off always lost themselves immediately. You grabbed an

  armful of straw and another of dried hop bines, and a faggot from

  the pile outside, and got the fire going for breakfast. Dorothy

  always cooked Nobby's breakfast as well as her own, and tapped on

  the wall of his hut when it was ready, she being better at waking

  up in the morning than he. It was very cold on those September

  mornings, the eastern sky was fading slowly from black to cobalt,

  and the grass was silvery white with dew. Your breakfast was

  always the same--bacon, tea, and bread fried in the grease of the

  bacon. While you ate it you cooked another exactly similar meal,

  to serve for dinner, and then, carrying your dinner-pail, you set

  out for the fields, a mile-and-a-half walk through the blue, windy

  dawn, with your nose running so in the cold that you had to stop

  occasionally and wipe it on your sacking apron.

  The hops were divided up into plantations of about an acre, and

  each set--forty pickers or thereabouts, under a foreman who was

  often a gypsy--picked one plantation at a time. The bines grew

  twelve feet high or more, and they were trained up strings and

  slung over horizontal wires, in rows a yard or two apart; in each

  row there was a sacking bin like a very deep hammock slung on a

  heavy wooden frame. As soon as you arrived you swung your bin into

  position, slit the strings from the next two bines, and tore them

  down--huge, tapering strands of foliage, like the plaits of

  Rapunzel's hair, that came tumbling down on top of you, showering

  you with dew. You dragged them into place over the bin, and then,

  starting at the thick end of the bine, began tearing off the heavy

  bunches of hops. At that hour of the morning you could only pick

  slowly and awkwardly. Your hands were still stiff and the coldness

  of the dew numbed them, and the hops were wet and slippery. The

  great difficulty was to pick the hops without picking the leaves

  and stalks as
well; for the measurer was liable to refuse your hops

  if they had too many leaves among them.

  The stems of the bines were covered with minute thorns which within

  two or three days had torn the skin of your hands to pieces. In

  the morning it was a torment to begin picking when your fingers

  were almost too stiff to bend and bleeding in a dozen places; but

  the pain wore off when the cuts had reopened and the blood was

  flowing freely. If the hops were good and you picked well, you

  could strip a bine in ten minutes, and the best bines yielded half

  a bushel of hops. But the hops varied greatly from one plantation

  to another. In some they were as large as walnuts, and hung in

  great leafless bunches which you could rip off with a single twist;

  in others they were miserable things no bigger than peas, and grew

  so thinly that you had to pick them one at a time. Some hops were

  so bad that you could not pick a bushel of them in an hour.

  It was slow work in the early morning, before the hops were dry

  enough to handle. But presently the sun came out, and the lovely,

  bitter odour began to stream from the warming hops, and people's

  early-morning surliness wore off, and the work got into its stride.

  From eight till midday you were picking, picking, picking, in a

  sort of passion of work--a passionate eagerness, which grew

  stronger and stronger as the morning advanced, to get each bine

  done and shift your bin a little farther along the row. At the

  beginning of each plantation all the bins started abreast, but by

  degrees the better pickers forged ahead, and some of them had

  finished their lane of hops when the others were barely halfway

  along; whereupon, if you were far behind, they were allowed to turn

  back and finish your row for you, which was called 'stealing your

  hops'. Dorothy and Nobby were always among the last, there being

  only two of them--there were four people at most of the bins. And

  Nobby was a clumsy picker, with his great coarse hands; on the

  whole, the women picked better than the men.

  It was always a neck and neck race between the two bins on either

  side of Dorothy and Nobby, bin number 6 and bin number 8. Bin

  number 6 was a family of gypsies--a curly-headed, ear-ringed

  father, an old dried-up leather-coloured mother, and two strapping

  sons--and bin number 8 was an old East End costerwoman who wore a

  broad hat and long black cloak and took snuff out of a papiermache

  box with a steamer painted on the lid. She was always helped by

  relays of daughters and granddaughters who came down from London

  for two days at a time. There was quite a troop of children

  working with the set, following the bins with baskets and gathering

  up the fallen hops while the adults picked. And the old

  costerwoman's tiny, pale granddaughter Rose, and a little gypsy

  girl, dark as an Indian, were perpetually slipping off to steal

  autumn raspberries and make swings out of hop bines; and the

  constant singing round the bins was pierced by shrill cries from

  the costerwoman of, 'Go on, Rose, you lazy little cat! Pick them

  'ops up! I'll warm your a-- for you!' etc., etc.

  Quite half the pickers in the set were gypsies--there were not less

  than two hundred of them in the camp. Diddykies, the other pickers

  called them. They were not a bad sort of people, friendly enough,

  and they flattered you grossly when they wanted to get anything out

  of you; yet they were sly, with the impenetrable slyness of

  savages. In their oafish, Oriental faces there was a look as of

  some wild but sluggish animal--a look of dense stupidity existing

  side by side with untameable cunning. Their talk consisted of

  about half a dozen remarks which they repeated over and over again

  without ever growing tired of them. The two young gypsies at bin

  number 6 would ask Nobby and Dorothy as many as a dozen times a day

  the same conundrum:

  'What is it the cleverest man in England couldn't do?'

  'I don't know. What?'

  'Tickle a gnat's a-- with a telegraph pole.'

  At this, never-failing bellows of laughter. They were all

  abysmally ignorant; they informed you with pride that not one of

  them could read a single word. The old curly-headed father, who

  had conceived some dim notion that Dorothy was a 'scholard', once

  seriously asked her whether he could drive his caravan to New York.

  At twelve o'clock a hooter down at the farm signalled to the

  pickers to knock off work for an hour, and it was generally a

  little before this that the measurer came round to collect the

  hops. At a warning shout from the foreman of ''Ops ready, number

  nineteen!' everyone would hasten to pick up the fallen hops, finish

  off the tendrils that had been left unpicked here and there, and

  clear the leaves out of the bin. There was an art in that. It did

  not pay to pick too 'clean', for leaves and hops alike all went to

  swell the tally. The old hands, such as the gypsies, were adepts

  at knowing just how 'dirty' it was safe to pick.

  The measurer would come round, carrying a wicker basket which held

  a bushel, and accompanied by the 'bookie,' who entered the pickings

  of each bin in a ledger. The 'bookies' were young men, clerks and

  chartered accountants and the like, who took this job as a paying

  holiday. The measurer would scoop the hops out of the bin a bushel

  at a time, intoning as he did so, 'One! Two! Three! Four!' and

  the pickers would enter the number in their tally books. Each

  bushel they picked earned them twopence, and naturally there were

  endless quarrels and accusations of unfairness over the measuring.

  Hops are spongy things--you can crush a bushel of them into a quart

  pot if you choose; so after each scoop one of the pickers would

  lean over into the bin and stir the hops up to make them lie

  looser, and then the measurer would hoist the end of the bin and

  shake the hops together again. Some mornings he had orders to

  'take them heavy', and would shovel them in so that he got a couple

  of bushels at each scoop, whereat there were angry yells of, 'Look

  how the b--'s ramming them down! Why don't you bloody well stamp

  on them?' etc.; and the old hands would say darkly that they had

  known measurers to be ducked in cowponds on the last day of

  picking. From the bins the hops were put into pokes which

  theoretically held a hundredweight; but it took two men to hoist a

  full poke when the measurer had been 'taking them heavy'. You had

  an hour for dinner, and you made a fire of hop bines--this was

  forbidden, but everyone did it--and heated up your tea and ate your

  bacon sandwiches. After dinner you were picking again till five or

  six in the evening, when the measurer came once more to take your

  hops, after which you were free to go back to the camp.

  Looking back, afterwards, upon her interlude of hop-picking, it was

  always the afternoons that Dorothy remembered. Those long,

  laborious hours in the strong sunlight, in the sound of forty

  voices singing, in the smell of hops and wood smo
ke, had a quality

  peculiar and unforgettable. As the afternoon wore on you grew

  almost too tired to stand, and the small green hop lice got into

  your hair and into your ears and worried you, and your hands, from

  the sulphurous juice, were as black as a Negro's except where they

  were bleeding. Yet you were happy, with an unreasonable happiness.

  The work took hold of you and absorbed you. It was stupid work,

  mechanical, exhausting, and every day more painful to the hands,

  and yet you never wearied of it; when the weather was fine and the

  hops were good you had the feeling that you could go on picking for

  ever and for ever. It gave you a physical joy, a warm satisfied

  feeling inside you, to stand there hour after hour, tearing off the

  heavy clusters and watching the pale green pile grow higher and

  higher in your bin, every bushel another twopence in your pocket.

  The sun burned down upon you, baking you brown, and the bitter,

  never-palling scent, like a wind from oceans of cool beer, flowed

  into your nostrils and refreshed you. When the sun was shining

  everybody sang as they worked; the plantations rang with singing.

  For some reason all the songs were sad that autumn--songs about

  rejected love and fidelity unrewarded, like gutter versions of

  Carmen and Manon Lescaut. There was:

  THERE they GO--IN their joy--

  'APPY girl--LUCKY boy--

  But 'ere am _I-I-I_--

  Broken--'A-A-Arted!

  And there was:

  But I'm dan--cing with tears--in my eyes--

  'Cos the girl--in my arms--isn't you-o-ou!

  And:

  The bells--are ringing--for Sally--

  But no-o-ot--for Sally--and me!

  The little gypsy girl used to sing over and over again:

  We're so misable, all so misable,

  Down on Misable Farm!

  And though everyone told her that the name of it was Misery Farm,

  she persisted in calling it Misable Farm. The old costerwoman and

  her granddaughter Rose had a hop-picking song which went:

  'Our lousy 'ops!

  Our lousy 'ops!

  When the measurer 'e comes round,

  Pick 'em up, pick 'em up off the ground!

  When 'e comes to measure,

  'E never knows where to stop;

  Ay, ay, get in the bin

  And take the bloody lot!'

  'There they go in their joy', and 'The bells are ringing for

  Sally', were the especial favourites. The pickers never grew tired

  of singing them; they must have sung both of them several hundred

  times over before the season came to an end. As much a part of the

  atmosphere of the hopfields as the bitter scent and the blowsy

  sunlight were the tunes of those two songs, ringing through the

  leafy lanes of the bines.

  When you got back to the camp, at half past six or thereabouts, you

  squatted down by the stream that ran past the huts, and washed your

  face, probably for the first time that day. It took you twenty

  minutes or so to get the coal-black filth off your hands. Water

  and even soap made no impression on it; only two things would

  remove it--one of them was mud, and the other, curiously enough,

  was hop juice. Then you cooked your supper, which was usually

  bread and tea and bacon again, unless Nobby had been along to the

  village and bought two pennyworth of pieces from the butcher. It

  was always Nobby who did the shopping. He was the sort of man who

  knows how to get four pennyworth of meat from the butcher for

  twopence, and, besides, he was expert in tiny economies. For

  instance, he always bought a cottage loaf in preference to any of

  the other shapes, because, as he used to point out, a cottage loaf

  seems like two loaves when you tear it in half.

  Even before you had eaten your supper you were dropping with sleep,

  but the huge fires that people used to build between the huts were

  too agreeable to leave. The farm allowed two faggots a day for

  each hut, but the pickers plundered as many more as they wanted,