Damn His Blood by Peter Moore

Author:Peter Moore [Moore, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448138401
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2012-06-20T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

The Old Barn

Netherwood Farm, Oddingley, 21–24 January 1830

THE CHRISTMAS OF 1829 passed and the new decade began with an exceptional spell of cold weather. Sharp frosts and swirling blizzards swept right across England, delaying mail coaches and rendering foot travel almost impossible. In London the Morning Chronicle informed its readers that ‘coachmen and guards describe the cold to have been the most severe they have ever experienced’, describing how 14 mail coaches had been buried in snowdrifts outside Marlborough. At Worthing on the south coast the local newspaper declared the cold had not been so intense for around 30 years. Further north the Sheffield Courant complained, ‘This is the severest winter we have had for some years and since our last we have experienced it in its wildest characteristics.’

Worcestershire was similarly chilled by the cold. Berrow’s Worcester Journal reported that the Birmingham and Worcester Canal had completely frozen over and that, in some stretches, sheets of ice extended right across the Severn. As the weeks passed, the temperatures showed little signs of change. On 20 January there was the heaviest snowfall yet. Roads leading into Worcester were blocked and London traffic was stopped indefinitely. The next day Berrow’s Journal recorded, ‘Yesterday morning Fahrenheit’s thermometer stood,1 in an exposed situation, at eighteen degrees below freezing.’ In the countryside the extreme weather made almost all farmwork impossible, and except for the carting of manure and the organisation of stables and barns all labouring jobs were abandoned in Oddingley for the first three weeks of 1830.2 Across the valley, fields, lanes and hedgerows all lay swathed in ice and snow.

Far from the village crossroads, isolated from the bulk of the parish by the canal, Netherwood was the most vulnerably situated of all Oddingley’s farms. The meadows and fields belonging to the property stretched out across the valley floor and were so deeply covered that no work could possibly be attempted. In Netherwood’s fold-yard, however, Charles Burton and his son were continuing stoically through the worst of the weather. Burton was a well known and dependable local carpenter who took on short-term contracts around Droitwich. He had worked at Netherwood for Thomas Clewes years earlier, and had been engaged by Henry Waterson, the farm’s current master, to pull down an old barn. It was a typical but time-consuming job for Burton, who had been forced to spend several frozen weeks in Oddingley, a place he was connected to through family as well as work: Elizabeth Newbury, whose first partner had been Richard Heming, was Burton’s elder sister.

This link, though, was an almost-forgotten one. Thomas Clewes’ tenure at Netherwood had finished in 1816, and since then the property had been leased by Waterson who had inherited a farm in disrepair. For years after his arrival he had strived to improve the condition of the barns and the outhouses, repeatedly petitioning his landlord, first Foley and later Galton, to replace a decaying barn that flanked one side of the yard. Each time he had been refused.

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