David Storey - Saville

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.