Saville (30 page)

The foreman, having removed his jacket, had gone out to the tractor. He lit a piece of rag, put it in a hole at the front, and began to swing the handle.

Colin got up and went across.

‘Nay, stand back,’ the foreman said. ‘This thing can give a kick when it begins to fire.’

He swung the handle.

‘It takes time to get warmed up, tha knows.’

He swung again.

There was a low sucking sound from inside the engine.

The foreman pulled out the piece of rag, stamped on it, then lit another. He flicked a lighter from his waistcoat pocket, put the blazing rag inside the hole, then quickly swung the handle, swung again, then stepped back sharply as the engine fired.

It puffed up a cloud of smoke from its vertical exhaust; a few moments later, after listening to the engine, he slowed it down and, wiping his hands on a cloth, came back across the yard.

‘Is this a regular job, or just your holidays?’ he said.

‘The holidays.’

‘Tha’s not been lakin’ truant, then?’

‘No.’

‘Here’s Jack,’ he said as a man in overalls rode into the yard. He got off his bike and pushed it to the shed. ‘Yon rabbit’s turned up: the one that came looking for a job,’ the foreman said. He added, ‘Mention work round here and you don’t see many folk for dust.’

The man had a long, thin face, with bony hands and arms; his hair was thin and cropped closely to his head. When he’d put his bike inside the shed he took off his jacket and opened a carrier bag hanging on the handle.

‘I mu’n have me breakfast. I never had time this morning,’ he said.

He took out a sandwich, coming to sit by Colin on the pile of sacks.

The foreman had brought out a scythe from the back of the shed; its blade was wrapped in sacking bound on with lengths of string. He slowly unfastened it, drawing out the blade.

A third man had arrived; he was short, thick-limbed with bowed legs, and older than the other two. He came walking along the path that led off, by a hedge, across the fields. He too wore a cap and carried a small brown bag, fastened with string across his shoulder.

‘Here’s Gordon: better late than never,’ the second man had
said. He finished his sandwich and put the remainder inside his carrier bag.

‘We mu’n get yon binder oiled up, afore the me’ster comes down, Jack,’ the foreman said. He placed the blade of the scythe against the sacks and went back once more inside the shed; he came out with the binder’s saw-toothed blade, wrapped, like the scythe had been, in sacking.

‘I see yon young ’un’s come,’ the bow-legged man had said.

He took off his cap and wiped his brow.

‘By God, we mu’n see the corn dry early today.’

He looked from the fields to Colin and back again.

‘It mu’n be too early to go in yet,’ the foreman said. In addition to the binder’s blade he’d brought out a small hand scythe which, sharpening on a stone, he brought over to the sacks.

‘Dost know how to use one of these?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Then I’ve got just the job for thee.’

He led the way across the yard. The tractor, puffing out its smoke, trembled on its massive tyres.

The foreman crossed the rutted track beyond the yard; they climbed a fence. A large field stretched down to a railway embankment; the grass was long; clumps of trees stood up in scattered copses. All across the field, in broad stretches, grew mounds of nettles.

Several horses were grazing by the fence.

‘I want you to cut them down,’ he said, indicating the nettles. ‘You know how to use a scythe, I take it?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Always cut away. Never cut towards.’

The grass was damp; his feet, in walking from the fence, were already wet.

The foreman disappeared towards the yard.

He worked quickly; he looked round at the immensity of the field, counted the nearest clumps, and worked more quickly still.

The sun was hot. A thin mist which had lain over the fields when he’d first set off had faded; the heat came down from a cloudless sky.

The horses, as he worked near them, raised their heads; he fed one or two with clumps of grass.

A car came up the track; it went past the opening to the yard and continued along the track to a distant house.

A train went past; the horses raised their heads: one of them began to gallop. It circuited the field: he could feel the ground tremble as it galloped past.

The car came back; he saw a fair-haired figure gazing out, then it turned into the road and disappeared.

Mounds of thistles and nettles were strewn out behind him now across the field; he switched the scythe to his other hand. The horses, their tails flicking at the heat, had moved into the shade beneath the trees.

The thumping of the tractor faded.

He’d been working for about an hour when the foreman reappeared. He called from the fence and waved.

When Colin reached the yard the bow-legged man was sharpening a scythe. The foreman was sharpening another; the binder and the tractor had disappeared. The second man was still sitting on the sacks. ‘Wheerst thy been, then?’ he said, finishing a sandwich.

‘Are you ready, Jack?’ the foreman said.

‘Aye, we’re ready, Tom,’ the second man said. ‘I’ve been waiting here for hours.’

They set off along a rutted track that ran round the back of the sheds. It followed the edge of a field, a metal fence on one side, marking off the grounds of a large stone house, wheat growing on the other. The crop had been blown down and flattened; as they walked along the foreman would stoop into the field and lift the stalks with the end of the scythe. Some of the heads were blackened.

‘He’ll not be pleased, will Smithy, when he s’es he’s got black rot.’

The other two men however took little notice as they walked along. The bow-legged man, the scythe on his shoulder, hung behind, talking to the bony man, who was still eating a sandwich, his carrier in his hand.

They came out on to a broad field which flowed off in an even wave to a near horizon; on the opposite side, at its lowest end, it ran up against a field of pasture, divided from it by a hawthorn hedge and by a copse of stunted, windswept trees.

‘Here’s the starting line, then, Gordon,’ the foreman said. ‘Up hill or down, whichever you choose.’

‘Am I having Jack, or the young ’un?’ the bow-legged man had said.

‘Nay, I’ll have him with me to begin with,’ the foreman said.

‘Then we’ll have downhill.’ The bony man laughed, setting his bag and his jacket beneath the hedge.

They set off, then, in opposite directions, cutting at the corn. The bow-legged man, scythed a track down the edge of the field, the taller man, stooping behind, binding up the corn in sheaves and propping them against the hedge. The foreman started up the slope, working for a while with casual strokes as if, absent-mindedly, he were sweeping a room.

After cutting several feet along the edge of the corn he came back to where Colin was picking up the strands.

He made one sheaf secure, then fastened another.

‘Theer, then, have you got the hang of it?’ he said.

He went back to the scythe.

To the weals and swellings on the backs of his hands were now added the cuts from the straw: thistles grew in clumps, threaded through with strands of wheat. Like the tall, bony man behind him, he leant the sheaves up against the hedge.

The heat had increased; they worked slowly up the hill.

‘Soft hands, have you?’ At intervals the foreman paused. ‘Shove ’em in salt water when you get home tonight.’

The sun rose higher; soon the other two men were tiny dots at the foot of the field. Beyond, in the pasture, cows moved slowly against the hedge: a narrow lane wound off towards a distant line of houses, large, built of brick and shrouded by trees. In the farthest distance, beyond other corn fields, stood the long, broken-backed outline of a colliery heap, a column of smoke drifting off in a vast, black seepage overhead. Intermittently, clouds of steam shot up, as large as hills.

A car came along the track from the sheds; it raised a cloud of dust at the entrance to the field.

A man got out, red-faced, burly; he took off a trilby hat and wiped his brow, gazing up to where Colin and the foreman worked.

‘Keep working. That’s Smithy,’ the foreman said.

The figure, examining the sheaves, came along the hedge. Colin went on working until a voice called out behind.

‘How’s it going, Tom?’

‘I think it’s going all right,’ the foreman said. ‘We’ll have it opened out, I think, tonight.’

‘Tha mu’n get round here in a day at least. This weather’ll never last.’ The man had pale-blue eyes; his legs were jodhpured. He glanced at Colin and shook his head. ‘What’s this twopence ha’penny worth o’ nowt?’

‘This is Colin,’ the foreman said.

‘How old are you, lad?’ the farmer said.

‘Eleven,’ Colin said.

‘Tha mu’n be fo’teen if anyone asks.’ He looked to the foreman. ‘And how’s he been working, then?’

‘Oh, he’s been all right,’ the foreman said. He winked to the farmer and nodded his head. ‘He’s been cutting yon thistles. He’s got half on ’em, I reckon, i’ the back of his hands.’

‘He’s not teking ’em home for fodder, is he?’

‘Aye,’ the foreman said. ‘I reckon he shall.’

‘And how’s that suit you?’ the farmer said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘How long are you going to be with us, then?’ he said. ‘Not here today and gone tomorrow?’

‘I can stay till the middle of September,’ he said.

‘Two months you can give us, then?’ He glanced, half-smiling, at the other man. ‘We’ve gotten us a full-time workman, Tom.’

‘Aye, he mu’n see us in with the harvest,’ the foreman said.

The farmer glanced down at Colin’s hands.

‘Where do you live, then, lad?’ he said.

‘Saxton.’

‘By go, tha’s got a long ride to get here, then.’ He looked down the field to the other men. ‘And what’s thy surname?’

‘Saville.’

‘Saville from Saxton. Well, A mu’n remember that.’ He turned to the foreman. ‘I’ll drop in tomorrow and see you start.’

He went down, slowly, to the other men, examining the heads of the corn. He talked to the men for a while, then returned to the car.

They worked till lunch-time; covered in dust, they went back to the shed.

The foreman sat apart to eat his food; the bow-legged man and the tall, bony man sat across the yard. They talked between themselves, lying in the shade beneath a tree, the older man scarcely speaking yet laughing frequently at what the other one had said.

Colin sat on the sacks by the door of the shed. He drank the bottle of cold tea his mother had given him and ate the dried-egg sandwiches she’d made.

The foreman drew out his watch at one o’clock.

‘Jack. Gordon.’ He got up slowly, lifting his scythe. He’d brought a thermos which he propped up by his bike. There was a smell of straw and grease from inside the shed.

The two men lay back beneath the tree.

‘No rest for the wicked,’ the taller one had said.

They set off to the field. Clouds of dust rose from their feet as they walked along. They climbed the field.

By mid-afternoon, working slowly, they’d reached the top.

‘There’ll be an hour or two of overtime tonight,’ the foreman said. He took out his watch which, since he’d removed his waist-coat, he’d transferred to the waistband of his trousers. ‘Are you all right for an hour or two?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As long as you like.’

The foreman, throughout the day, had spoken little; when his back wasn’t stooped to the scythe he was sharpening the blade, or, his gaze half-abstracted, he’d be staring back, watching the sheaf he was fastening, then nodding his head.

Colin, as he worked, was adding up the money he’d earn. Eight hours on the first day would be seventy-two pence. Seventy-two pence were six shillings. If he worked overtime for an hour he’d make another ninepence, plus fourpence half-penny; if he worked overtime for two hours he’d make two shillings and threepence, bringing his wage for the day to over eight shillings. Even without overtime he’d calculated he could earn thirty-three shillings in a single week; it gave him a fresh energy the more he worked it out. He felt now he could work until it grew dark; once the mid-afternoon was passed the rest of the day had seemed downhill.

They worked till seven. It had taken them six hours of the afternoon and three hours of the morning to open up the field. He could hardly mount the bike when he got back to the sheds.

‘Eight o’clock tomorrow,’ the foreman said.

‘Don’t come too early, now,’ the bow-legged man had said. He and the bony man had laughed. They stood talking by the sheds while the foreman locked the door. Finally the older of the two set off across the fields and the other rode off on his bike towards the track.

Colin cycled after him. As he reached the wooden gate which opened to the road the foreman went past on his motor-bike: he waved to the bony man and set off towards the distant houses.

At each of the hills Colin got off to walk. It was well after eight when he got back home. He’d been away from the house for over thirteen hours. He leant the bike against the wall and staggered in.

Steven, in his pyjamas, was standing by the fire; his mother, with a pair of scissors, was cutting his nails.

‘Wherever have you been?’ she said, her mouth opening then as she saw his state.

He caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror above the sink, red, almost crimson, streaked with sweat; his hair and eyebrows were white with dust.

‘I’ll be all right when I’ve had a wash,’ he said.

‘But where have you been?’

‘We worked overtime,’ he said.

The touch of the water against his hands began to fade. He rubbed the soap against his arms; he rubbed his face; he rinsed his head beneath the tap.

‘Your meal’s been waiting for hours,’ his mother said.

‘Just put it on the table, then,’ he said.

‘Well,’ his mother said. ‘Are you going to be home at this time every night?’

‘Oh, I’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Once I’ve worked in I’ll easily manage.’