England and the English by Ford Madox Ford

Author:Ford Madox Ford [Sara Haslam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847778932
Publisher: Carcanet
Published: 2012-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER III

In the Cottages

AT the end of a closed field, in a hollow of the woods, so deep and so moist that it was twilight there even at high noon, there stood a thatched mud cottage – a two-dwelling house – the door-sill of which I never crossed without anticipations of pleasure such as I have known on the sills of few houses. There lived at one end of the hovel an aged man for whom I had no respect, and in the low dark rooms, hung with clothes upon lines that kept away the draughts of the gaping walls, Meary.

I met her first at dusk, scrambling over the high stile of a path that, running between squatters’ hovels on a common, was one of a maze of similar paved footways. In a purplish linsey-woolsey, as broad as the back of a cow, her face hidden in a black sun-bonnet that suggested the hood of a hop-oast, she was burdened with two immense baskets, from which protruded the square blue, white, and lead-coloured packages of the village grocer up on the ridge from which we had both descended. I offered to carry her burdens as far as we might be going together, and she said, without the least touch of embarrassment or of over-recognition –

‘Why, thank ye, mister. I’ll do as much for you when ye come to be my age.’

Her face was round and brown, her forehead broad and brown, and her brown eyes were alert and reposeful as if she were conscious of a reserve of strength sufficient to help her over all the stiles that are to be found in this life. They had, her eyes, the sort of master-fulness that you will see in those of a bull that gazes across the meadows and reflects.

I think I cared for her more than for any friend I have made before or since, and now that she has been dead for a year or so her memory seems to make sacred and to typify all those patient and good-humoured toilers of the fields that, for me, are the heart of the country. If you saw her at work in the hop-fields, with her hands and arms stained walnut-green to the elbows; in her own potato-patch stooping, in immense boots, to drop the seed potatoes into the rows; striding through the dewy grass of the fields to do a job of monthly nursing; or standing with one hand over her eyes in the doorway that she fitted so exactly that her thin hair was brushed by the four-foot thatch, she had one unfailing form of words, one unfailing smile upon her lips – ‘Ah keep all on gooing!’ And that was at once her philosophy and her reason for existence.

And to keep all on going until you drop – as she did, poor soul, until within three days of the appearance of her illness – that is the philosophy and the apologia pro vitâ of the countryside. Your ambition

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