Bain’t Feasible

It was May 1968. Students all over Europe were in revolt. My heart was with them, but my bottom was on a chair in the agricultural section of the university library, where I was revising for the end-of year exams. Eventually I could take no more of the life-cycle of the frit fly, that scourge of the oat crop, and got up to stroll round the shelves, vaguely scanning titles: Profitable Sheep Farming, Soil Conditions and Plant Growth, The Pig: Modern Husbandry and Marketing . . . Then my eye was drawn to a book I’d never seen before: Farmer’s Glory, by A. G. Street.

I knew about A. G. Street. He had had a regular column in the Farmers’ Weekly and frequently appeared on BBC Radio’s Any Questions? But I didn’t know that he had written a book. I took it down from the shelf, opened it at random, and was drawn into a different farming world. After a few minutes my conscience surfaced, I put the book back and returned to the exploits of the frit fly. But I had been hooked. For the remainder of the exam season, whenever my attention began to wander, I found myself drawn to another few pages of Farmer’s Glory, and before long I had finished it. Next to it on the shelf were several other rural memoirs – Hodge and His Masters and The Gamekeeper at Home by Richard Jeffries, George Henderson’s The Farming Ladder, Ruth Janette Ruck’s Place of Stones, Thomas Firbank’s I Bought a Mountain – and I read my way through them all. The following year I specialized in the study of agricultural economics and policy, and we were told that we could never understand agricultural policy unless we had some idea of how it had developed. We were forced to read agricultural history, and the spark of Farmer’s Glory was fanned into flame. I went on to do research in the history of agriculture, and have remained an agricultural historian to this day. Farmer’s Glory, which appeared in 1932 when Street was 40, was autobiographical, though in it he called himself ‘Jim Blanchard’ and changed other names. After leaving school Street had worked on his father’s farm just outside Wilton in Wiltshire for four years. Then, perhaps inevitably, there was a falling-out over how much responsibility he should be given. He decided to go abroad and found a job on a farm in Canada, where he clearly did a lot of growing up before coming home just after the outbreak of the First World War. Rejected by the Army on the grounds that he had flat feet, he went back to work with his increasingly arthritic father, and on the latter’s death in 1917 he took over the farm. This course of events provided Street with the structure of his book. The first third of Farmer’s Glory describes ‘The Spacious Days’ of traditional Wiltshire farming. Then comes ‘A Canadian Interlude’ of much rude awakening and learning to cope on his own in completely unfamiliar domestic and agricultural circumstances. The final third, in contrast to the golden-hued memories of his youth and the vigorous stories of life on the Canadian prairie, tells of his struggle to change his methods and avoid bankruptcy in the difficult farming years of the 1920s and early 1930s. He called it ‘The Waning of the Glory’, and of it he wrote:

I have been informed by a friendly critic, who has watched with interest my amateurish struggles in attempting this book, that this portion of it lacks charm as compared with the earlier pages. I am afraid that this is only too true. Success and money-making, although they are often sordid, can be charming, but failure and loss never can be. I think that it was the placid unchanging well-being of years ago, which made rural life so charming. Possibly it is simply that age has a mellowing effect, and that one remembers only the pleasant portions of that bygone period.

Although Street makes no attempt to hide the hard work involved in the farming of his youth, the first part of the book is a classic piece of pastoral, or perhaps more accurately Georgic, writing. He looks back to a time when one did one’s duty by the land, farmed according to local customs and traditions, and took one’s proper place in rural society. The farm workers of late Victorian and Edwardian Wiltshire are his heroes, and through him we come to know them individually – carters, shepherds, dairymen and day labourers. Take Charles Bailey:

He was called Lawyer Charlie by his mates, as he always had charge of the financial side of their collective jobs. When the price of a piece of hoeing had to be settled, he was always the spokesman, and his great word in these discussions was ‘feasible’. Apparently to single turnips at six shillings per acre was feasible, but the suggestion to do mangolds at anything less than seven shillings per acre always brought the retort: ‘No, zur, bain’t feasible.’ Poor old Charlie is dead now. In my early days he was a good craftsman at all farm work, scrupulously honest, and he had a personal pride in the farm and everything and everybody connected with it.

The other hero is his father, ‘the guvnor’, or ‘the organizer’, for whom things always seemed to go right, whether he was organizing his labour force, or buying and selling, or simply being in the right place at the right time, and Street pays tribute to him in terms that would make any father proud: ‘In my youth I railed often at many little things he did, but in every big crisis in my life I never turned to my father in vain. That is, I think, a wholesome memory for any man to leave to his son.’ This affectionate portrait of traditional rural England, with its annual cycle of ploughing, sowing, harvesting and threshing, lambing and calving, sheep sales and harvest suppers, is made even more attractive by the contrast with what came next. Street discovered that farming in north-west Manitoba, with long days of work and far fewer people to do it, few domestic comforts and nobody but himself to provide them, and winters of terrible cold, was very different from the life he had left behind in England. But learning to cope with it, to adapt to new ways, to rely on his own efforts, opened his eyes to his own abilities. After the immensely hard work of ploughing a section of virgin prairie, full of boulders, trees and scrub that had to be hauled out by the roots, he writes, ‘I do not remember when I have been more satisfied and pleased with my lot; even today the memory of that job gives me great pleasure.’ In fact he was so taken with Canada that he planned, after the harvest of 1914, to return to England to persuade his father to finance him in buying a farm on the prairie. But the war and his father’s death ordered matters otherwise, and so opens the final third of the book, with its story of his struggle – touch and go, but ultimately successful – to survive the post-war problems of farming. Street was known to far more people as a writer and broadcaster than he ever would have been had he remained only a farmer. He first began to write in 1929, when a bout of flu kept him indoors. Incensed by an article on farming in the Daily Mail, and challenged by his wife to do better, he produced a response which the paper published and paid for, as his daughter, the writer Pamela Street, reports in her affectionate memoir My Father, A. G. Street (1969). Since the fee of three guineas would comfortably have paid the week’s wages of a farm worker, and it had taken him only about an hour to write, he clearly felt that this was a profitable pastime. Encouraged by the novelist Edith Olivier, who was a neighbour, and the Faber publisher Richard de la Mare, he wrote Farmer’s Glory in 1931, at the depth of the interwar depression in farm prices. It was an immediate critical and commercial success. Reviewers compared him to Cobbett and Gilbert White. He followed it up rapidly with a successful novel, Strawberry Roan, which was made into a film. By 1951, when Penguin published a revised edition of Farmer’s Glory, he had written another twenty-one books on farming and country life, and several novels, as well as many pieces of journalism and much broadcasting – all while continuing to farm. But it was Farmer’s Glory that changed his life, and it changed mine too.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 39 © Paul Brassley 2013