and keeping it alight. They were hiding in a beech wood, under a
squat, ancient tree that kept the wind away but also wetted them
periodically with sprinklings of chilly dew. Nobby, stretched on
his back, mouth open, one broad cheek faintly illumined by the
feeble rays of the fire, slept as peacefully as a child. All night
long a vague wonder, born of sleeplessness and intolerable
discomfort, kept stirring in Dorothy's mind. Was this the life to
which she had been bred--this life of wandering empty-bellied all
day and shivering at night under dripping trees? Had it been like
this even in the blank past? Where had she come from? Who was
she? No answer came, and they were on the road at dawn. By the
evening they had tried at eleven farms in all, and Dorothy's legs
were giving out, and she was so dizzy with fatigue that she found
difficulty in walking straight.
But late in the evening, quite unexpectedly, their luck turned.
They tried at a farm named Cairns's, in the village of Clintock,
and were taken on immediately, with no questions asked. The
overseer merely looked them up and down, said briefly, 'Right you
are--you'll do. Start in the morning; bin number 7, set 19,' and
did not even bother to ask their names. Hop-picking, it seemed,
needed neither character nor experience.
They found their way to the meadow where the pickers' camp was
situated. In a dreamlike state, between exhaustion and the joy of
having got a job at last, Dorothy found herself walking through a
maze of tin-roofed huts and gypsies' caravans with many-coloured
washing hanging from the windows. Hordes of children swarmed in
the narrow grass alleys between the huts, and ragged, agreeable-
looking people were cooking meals over innumerable faggot fires.
At the bottom of the field there were some round tin huts, much
inferior to the others, set apart for unmarried people. An old man
who was toasting cheese at a fire directed Dorothy to one of the
women's huts.
Dorothy pushed open the door of the hut. It was about twelve feet
across, with unglazed windows which had been boarded up, and it had
no furniture whatever. There seemed to be nothing in it but an
enormous pile of straw reaching to the roof--in fact, the hut was
almost entirely filled with straw. To Dorothy's eyes, already
sticky with sleep, the straw looked paradisically comfortable. She
began to push her way into it, and was checked by a sharp yelp from
beneath her.
"Ere! What yer doin' of? Get off of it! 'Oo asked YOU to walk
about on my belly, stoopid?'
Seemingly there were women down among the straw. Dorothy burrowed
forward more circumspectly, tripped over something, sank into the
straw and in the same instant began to fall asleep. A rough-
looking woman, partially undressed, popped up like a mermaid from
the strawy sea.
''Ullo, mate!' she said. 'Jest about all in, ain't you, mate?'
'Yes, I'm tired--very tired.'
'Well, you'll bloody freeze in this straw with no bed-clo'es on
you. Ain't you got a blanket?'
'No.'
''Alf a mo, then. I got a poke 'ere.'
She dived down into the straw and re-emerged with a hop-poke seven
feet long. Dorothy was asleep already. She allowed herself to be
woken up, and inserted herself somehow into the sack, which was so
long that she could get into it head and all; and then she was half
wriggling, half sinking down, deep down, into a nest of straw
warmer and drier than she had conceived possible. The straw
tickled her nostrils and got into her hair and pricked her even
through the sack, but at that moment no imaginable sleeping place--
not Cleopatra's couch of swan's-down nor the floating bed of Haroun
al Raschid--could have caressed her more voluptuously.
3
It was remarkable how easily, once you had got a job, you settled
down to the routine of hop-picking. After only a week of it you
ranked as an expert picker, and felt as though you had been picking
hops all your life.
It was exceedingly easy work. Physically, no doubt, it was
exhausting--it kept you on your feet ten or twelve hours a day, and
you were dropping with sleep by six in the evening--but it needed
no kind of skill. Quite a third of the pickers in the camp were as
new to the job as Dorothy herself. Some of them had come down from
London with not the dimmest idea of what hops were like, or how you
picked them, or why. One man, it was said, on his first morning on
the way to the fields, had asked, 'Where are the spades?' He
imagined that hops were dug up out of the ground.
Except for Sundays, one day at the hop camp was very like another.
At half past five, at a tap on the wall of your hut, you crawled
out of your sleeping nest and began searching for your shoes, amid
sleepy curses from the women (there were six or seven or possibly
even eight of them) who were buried here and there in the straw.
In that vast pile of straw any clothes that you were so unwise as
to take off always lost themselves immediately. You grabbed an
armful of straw and another of dried hop bines, and a faggot from
the pile outside, and got the fire going for breakfast. Dorothy
always cooked Nobby's breakfast as well as her own, and tapped on
the wall of his hut when it was ready, she being better at waking
up in the morning than he. It was very cold on those September
mornings, the eastern sky was fading slowly from black to cobalt,
and the grass was silvery white with dew. Your breakfast was
always the same--bacon, tea, and bread fried in the grease of the
bacon. While you ate it you cooked another exactly similar meal,
to serve for dinner, and then, carrying your dinner-pail, you set
out for the fields, a mile-and-a-half walk through the blue, windy
dawn, with your nose running so in the cold that you had to stop
occasionally and wipe it on your sacking apron.
The hops were divided up into plantations of about an acre, and
each set--forty pickers or thereabouts, under a foreman who was
often a gypsy--picked one plantation at a time. The bines grew
twelve feet high or more, and they were trained up strings and
slung over horizontal wires, in rows a yard or two apart; in each
row there was a sacking bin like a very deep hammock slung on a
heavy wooden frame. As soon as you arrived you swung your bin into
position, slit the strings from the next two bines, and tore them
down--huge, tapering strands of foliage, like the plaits of
Rapunzel's hair, that came tumbling down on top of you, showering
you with dew. You dragged them into place over the bin, and then,
starting at the thick end of the bine, began tearing off the heavy
bunches of hops. At that hour of the morning you could only pick
slowly and awkwardly. Your hands were still stiff and the coldness
of the dew numbed them, and the hops were wet and slippery. The
great difficulty was to pick the hops without picking the leaves
and stalks as
well; for the measurer was liable to refuse your hops
if they had too many leaves among them.
The stems of the bines were covered with minute thorns which within
two or three days had torn the skin of your hands to pieces. In
the morning it was a torment to begin picking when your fingers
were almost too stiff to bend and bleeding in a dozen places; but
the pain wore off when the cuts had reopened and the blood was
flowing freely. If the hops were good and you picked well, you
could strip a bine in ten minutes, and the best bines yielded half
a bushel of hops. But the hops varied greatly from one plantation
to another. In some they were as large as walnuts, and hung in
great leafless bunches which you could rip off with a single twist;
in others they were miserable things no bigger than peas, and grew
so thinly that you had to pick them one at a time. Some hops were
so bad that you could not pick a bushel of them in an hour.
It was slow work in the early morning, before the hops were dry
enough to handle. But presently the sun came out, and the lovely,
bitter odour began to stream from the warming hops, and people's
early-morning surliness wore off, and the work got into its stride.
From eight till midday you were picking, picking, picking, in a
sort of passion of work--a passionate eagerness, which grew
stronger and stronger as the morning advanced, to get each bine
done and shift your bin a little farther along the row. At the
beginning of each plantation all the bins started abreast, but by
degrees the better pickers forged ahead, and some of them had
finished their lane of hops when the others were barely halfway
along; whereupon, if you were far behind, they were allowed to turn
back and finish your row for you, which was called 'stealing your
hops'. Dorothy and Nobby were always among the last, there being
only two of them--there were four people at most of the bins. And
Nobby was a clumsy picker, with his great coarse hands; on the
whole, the women picked better than the men.
It was always a neck and neck race between the two bins on either
side of Dorothy and Nobby, bin number 6 and bin number 8. Bin
number 6 was a family of gypsies--a curly-headed, ear-ringed
father, an old dried-up leather-coloured mother, and two strapping
sons--and bin number 8 was an old East End costerwoman who wore a
broad hat and long black cloak and took snuff out of a papiermache
box with a steamer painted on the lid. She was always helped by
relays of daughters and granddaughters who came down from London
for two days at a time. There was quite a troop of children
working with the set, following the bins with baskets and gathering
up the fallen hops while the adults picked. And the old
costerwoman's tiny, pale granddaughter Rose, and a little gypsy
girl, dark as an Indian, were perpetually slipping off to steal
autumn raspberries and make swings out of hop bines; and the
constant singing round the bins was pierced by shrill cries from
the costerwoman of, 'Go on, Rose, you lazy little cat! Pick them
'ops up! I'll warm your a-- for you!' etc., etc.
Quite half the pickers in the set were gypsies--there were not less
than two hundred of them in the camp. Diddykies, the other pickers
called them. They were not a bad sort of people, friendly enough,
and they flattered you grossly when they wanted to get anything out
of you; yet they were sly, with the impenetrable slyness of
savages. In their oafish, Oriental faces there was a look as of
some wild but sluggish animal--a look of dense stupidity existing
side by side with untameable cunning. Their talk consisted of
about half a dozen remarks which they repeated over and over again
without ever growing tired of them. The two young gypsies at bin
number 6 would ask Nobby and Dorothy as many as a dozen times a day
the same conundrum:
'What is it the cleverest man in England couldn't do?'
'I don't know. What?'
'Tickle a gnat's a-- with a telegraph pole.'
At this, never-failing bellows of laughter. They were all
abysmally ignorant; they informed you with pride that not one of
them could read a single word. The old curly-headed father, who
had conceived some dim notion that Dorothy was a 'scholard', once
seriously asked her whether he could drive his caravan to New York.
At twelve o'clock a hooter down at the farm signalled to the
pickers to knock off work for an hour, and it was generally a
little before this that the measurer came round to collect the
hops. At a warning shout from the foreman of ''Ops ready, number
nineteen!' everyone would hasten to pick up the fallen hops, finish
off the tendrils that had been left unpicked here and there, and
clear the leaves out of the bin. There was an art in that. It did
not pay to pick too 'clean', for leaves and hops alike all went to
swell the tally. The old hands, such as the gypsies, were adepts
at knowing just how 'dirty' it was safe to pick.
The measurer would come round, carrying a wicker basket which held
a bushel, and accompanied by the 'bookie,' who entered the pickings
of each bin in a ledger. The 'bookies' were young men, clerks and
chartered accountants and the like, who took this job as a paying
holiday. The measurer would scoop the hops out of the bin a bushel
at a time, intoning as he did so, 'One! Two! Three! Four!' and
the pickers would enter the number in their tally books. Each
bushel they picked earned them twopence, and naturally there were
endless quarrels and accusations of unfairness over the measuring.
Hops are spongy things--you can crush a bushel of them into a quart
pot if you choose; so after each scoop one of the pickers would
lean over into the bin and stir the hops up to make them lie
looser, and then the measurer would hoist the end of the bin and
shake the hops together again. Some mornings he had orders to
'take them heavy', and would shovel them in so that he got a couple
of bushels at each scoop, whereat there were angry yells of, 'Look
how the b--'s ramming them down! Why don't you bloody well stamp
on them?' etc.; and the old hands would say darkly that they had
known measurers to be ducked in cowponds on the last day of
picking. From the bins the hops were put into pokes which
theoretically held a hundredweight; but it took two men to hoist a
full poke when the measurer had been 'taking them heavy'. You had
an hour for dinner, and you made a fire of hop bines--this was
forbidden, but everyone did it--and heated up your tea and ate your
bacon sandwiches. After dinner you were picking again till five or
six in the evening, when the measurer came once more to take your
hops, after which you were free to go back to the camp.
Looking back, afterwards, upon her interlude of hop-picking, it was
always the afternoons that Dorothy remembered. Those long,
laborious hours in the strong sunlight, in the sound of forty
voices singing, in the smell of hops and wood smo
ke, had a quality
peculiar and unforgettable. As the afternoon wore on you grew
almost too tired to stand, and the small green hop lice got into
your hair and into your ears and worried you, and your hands, from
the sulphurous juice, were as black as a Negro's except where they
were bleeding. Yet you were happy, with an unreasonable happiness.
The work took hold of you and absorbed you. It was stupid work,
mechanical, exhausting, and every day more painful to the hands,
and yet you never wearied of it; when the weather was fine and the
hops were good you had the feeling that you could go on picking for
ever and for ever. It gave you a physical joy, a warm satisfied
feeling inside you, to stand there hour after hour, tearing off the
heavy clusters and watching the pale green pile grow higher and
higher in your bin, every bushel another twopence in your pocket.
The sun burned down upon you, baking you brown, and the bitter,
never-palling scent, like a wind from oceans of cool beer, flowed
into your nostrils and refreshed you. When the sun was shining
everybody sang as they worked; the plantations rang with singing.
For some reason all the songs were sad that autumn--songs about
rejected love and fidelity unrewarded, like gutter versions of
Carmen and Manon Lescaut. There was:
THERE they GO--IN their joy--
'APPY girl--LUCKY boy--
But 'ere am _I-I-I_--
Broken--'A-A-Arted!
And there was:
But I'm dan--cing with tears--in my eyes--
'Cos the girl--in my arms--isn't you-o-ou!
And:
The bells--are ringing--for Sally--
But no-o-ot--for Sally--and me!
The little gypsy girl used to sing over and over again:
We're so misable, all so misable,
Down on Misable Farm!
And though everyone told her that the name of it was Misery Farm,
she persisted in calling it Misable Farm. The old costerwoman and
her granddaughter Rose had a hop-picking song which went:
'Our lousy 'ops!
Our lousy 'ops!
When the measurer 'e comes round,
Pick 'em up, pick 'em up off the ground!
When 'e comes to measure,
'E never knows where to stop;
Ay, ay, get in the bin
And take the bloody lot!'
'There they go in their joy', and 'The bells are ringing for
Sally', were the especial favourites. The pickers never grew tired
of singing them; they must have sung both of them several hundred
times over before the season came to an end. As much a part of the
atmosphere of the hopfields as the bitter scent and the blowsy
sunlight were the tunes of those two songs, ringing through the
leafy lanes of the bines.
When you got back to the camp, at half past six or thereabouts, you
squatted down by the stream that ran past the huts, and washed your
face, probably for the first time that day. It took you twenty
minutes or so to get the coal-black filth off your hands. Water
and even soap made no impression on it; only two things would
remove it--one of them was mud, and the other, curiously enough,
was hop juice. Then you cooked your supper, which was usually
bread and tea and bacon again, unless Nobby had been along to the
village and bought two pennyworth of pieces from the butcher. It
was always Nobby who did the shopping. He was the sort of man who
knows how to get four pennyworth of meat from the butcher for
twopence, and, besides, he was expert in tiny economies. For
instance, he always bought a cottage loaf in preference to any of
the other shapes, because, as he used to point out, a cottage loaf
seems like two loaves when you tear it in half.
Even before you had eaten your supper you were dropping with sleep,
but the huge fires that people used to build between the huts were
too agreeable to leave. The farm allowed two faggots a day for
each hut, but the pickers plundered as many more as they wanted,