The robin, 'jolly Robin!' is an unlucky bird in some places. When the horse-chestnut leaves turn scarlet the redbreast sings in a peculiarly plaintive way, as if in tone with the dropping leaves and the chill air that follows the early morning frost. You may tell how much moisture there is in the air in a given place by the colours of the autumn leaves; the horse-chestnut, scarlet near a stream, is merely yellowish in drier soils. Cock robin sings the louder for the silence of other birds, and if he comes to the farmstead and pipes away day by day on a bare cherry tree or any bough that is near the door, after his custom, the farmer thinks it an evil omen. For a robin to sing persistently near the house winter or summer is a sign that something is about to go wrong. Yet the farmer will not shoot him. The roughest poaching fellows who would torture a dog will not kill a robin; it is bad luck to have anything to do with it. Most people like to see fir boughs and holly brought into the house to brighten the dark days with their green, but the cottage children tell you that they must not bring a green fir branch indoors, because as it withers their parents will be taken ill and fade away. Indeed the labouring people seem in all their ways and speech to be different, survivals perhaps of a time when their words and superstitions were the ways of a ruder England. The lanes and the gateways in the fields, as they say, are 'slubby' enough in November, and those who try to go through get 'slubbed' up to their knees. This expresses a soft, plastic, and adhesive condition of the mud which comes on after it has been 'raining hop-poles' for a week. The labourer has little else to do but to chop up disused hop-poles into long fagots with a hand-bill--in other counties a bill-hook. All his class bitterly resent the lowering of wages which takes place in winter; it is a shame, they say, and they evidently think that the farmers ought to be forced to pay them more--they are starvation wages. On the other hand, the farmer, racked in every direction, and unable to sell his produce, finds the labour bill the most difficult to meet, because it comes with unfailing regularity every Saturday. A middle-aged couple of cottagers left their home, and the wife told us how they had walked and walked day after day, but the farmers said they were too poor to give them a job. So at last the man, as they went grumbling on the highway, lost his temper, and hit her a 'clod' in the head, 'and I never spoke to him for an _hour_ afterwards; no, that I didn't; not for an hour.' A clod is a heavy, lumping blow. Their home was 'broad' of Hurst--that is, in the Hurst district, but at some little distance.
'There a' sets' is a constant expression for there it lies. A dish on the table, a cat on the hearth, a plough in the field, 'there a' sets,' there it is. 'No bounds' is another. It may rain all day long, 'there's no bounds;' that is, no knowing. 'I may go to fair, no bounds,' it is uncertain, I have not made up my mind. A folk so vague in their ideas are very fond of this 'no bounds;' it is like the 'Quien sabe?' of the Mexicans, who knows? and accompanies every remark. An avaricious person is very 'having;' wants to have everything. What are usually called dog-irons on the hearth are called brand-irons, having to support the brand or burning log. Where every one keeps fowls the servant girls are commonly asked if they can cram a chicken, if they understand how to fatten it by filling its crop artificially. 'Sure,' pronounced with great emphasis on the 'su,' like the 'shure' of the Irish, comes out at every sentence. 'I shan't do it all, sure;' and if any one is giving a narration, the polite listener has to throw in a deep 'sure' of assent at every pause. 'Cluttered up' means in a litter, surrounded with too many things to do at once. Of a little girl they said she was pretty, but she had 'bolted' eyes; a portrait was a good one, but 'his eyes bolt so, meaning thereby full, staring eyes, that seem to start out of the head. A drunken man, says the poor wife, is not worth a hatful of crab apples. The boys go hoop-driving, never bowling. If in any difficulty they say, 'I hope to match it out to the end of the week,' to make the provisions last, or fit the work in. Most difficult of all to express is the way they say yes and no. It is neither yes nor no, nor yea nor nay, but a cross between it somehow. To say yes they shut their lips and then open them as if gasping for breath and emit a sort of 'yath' without the 'th,' more like 'yeah,' and better still if to get the closing of the lips you say 'em' first--'em-yeah.' The no is 'nah' with a sort of jerk on the h; 'na-h,' This yeah and nah is most irritating to fresh ears; you do not seem to know if your servant has taken any notice of what you said, or is making a mouth at you in derision.
The farmers are always complaining that the men crawl through their work and put no energy into anything, just as if they were afraid to use their hands. More particularly, if there is any little extra thing to be done, they could not possibly do it. A wheat rick was threshed one day, and when it was finished in the afternoon there were the sacks in a great heap about twenty or thirty yards from the barn. So soon as the rick was finished, the men asked for their money as usual, when the farmer said he wanted them to carry the sacks into the barn before they left. Oh no, they couldn't do that. 'Well, then,' said he, 'I can't pay you till you have done it.' No, they couldn't do it, couldn't be expected to carry sacks of wheat across the rickyard and into the barn like that, it was too much for any man to do; why couldn't he send for the cart? The farmer replied that the cart was two miles away, engaged in other labour; the night was coming on, and if it rained in the night the wheat would be damaged. No, they couldn't do it. The farmer would not pay them, and so the dispute continued for a long time. At length the farmer said, 'Well, if you won't do it, perhaps you will at least help me as far as this: will you lift up a sack and place it on another high enough for me to get it on my back, and I will myself carry them to the barn?' So small a favour they could not refuse, and having raised up a sack for him in this manner, he took it on his back and made off with it to the barn. He was anything but a strong man--far less able to carry a sack of wheat than the labourers--but determined not to be beaten. He carried one sack, then another and another, till he had got eight safely housed, when on coming back for the ninth he met a labourer with a sack on his back, shamed into giving assistance. After him a second man took a sack, and one by one they all followed, till in about half an hour all the wheat was in the barn. This is the spirit in which they work if the least little difficulty occurs, or they are asked to do anything that varies from what they did yesterday or the day before, they cannot possibly accomplish it.
Since, however, the farmers have been unable to sell their produce and winter wages have gone down, and work is scarce, the position of the labourer is a very dull one, and it is feared the present winter will be a hard time for many homes. Numbers talk of emigrating, and some have taken the first step, and will sell their furniture and leave a land where neither farmer nor labourer has any hope. One middle-aged cottage woman, married, kept harping upon the holiday they should have during the voyage to America. That seemed to her the great beauty of emigration, the great temptation. For ten days, while the voyage lasted, she would have nothing to do, but could rest! She had never had such a holiday in all her life. How hard must be the life which makes such a trifling circumstance as a week's rest appear so heavenly!
[The end]
Richard Jefferies's essay: Field Words And Ways