and also great lumps of elm root which kept smouldering till
morning. On some nights the fires were so enormous that twenty
people could sit round them in comfort, and there was singing far
into the night, and telling of stories and roasting of stolen
apples. Youths and girls slipped off to the dark lanes together,
and a few bold spirits like Nobby set out with sacks and robbed the
neighbouring orchards, and the children played hide-and-seek in the
dusk and harried the nightjars which haunted the camp and which, in
their cockney ignorance, they imagined to be pheasants. On
Saturday nights fifty or sixty of the pickers used to get drunk in
the pub and then march down the village street roaring bawdy songs,
to the scandal of the inhabitants, who looked on the hopping season
as decent provincials in Roman Gaul might have looked on the yearly
incursion of the Goths.
When finally you managed to drag yourself away to your nest in the
straw, it was none too warm or comfortable. After that first
blissful night, Dorothy discovered that straw is wretched stuff to
sleep in. It is not only prickly, but, unlike hay, it lets in the
draught from every possible direction. However, you had the chance
to steal an almost unlimited number of hop-pokes from the fields,
and by making herself a sort of cocoon of four hop-pokes, one on
top of the other, she managed to keep warm enough to sleep at any
rate five hours a night.
4
As to what you earned by hop-picking, it was just enough to keep
body and soul together, and no more.
The rate of pay at Cairns's was twopence a bushel, and given good
hops a practised picker can average three bushels an hour. In
theory, therefore, it would have been possible to earn thirty
shillings by a sixty-hour week. Actually, no one in the camp came
anywhere near this figure. The best pickers of all earned thirteen
or fourteen shillings a week, and the worst hardly as much as six
shillings. Nobby and Dorothy, pooling their hops and dividing the
proceeds, made round about ten shillings a week each.
There were various reasons for this. To begin with, there was the
badness of the hops in some of the fields. Again, there were the
delays which wasted an hour or two of every day. When one
plantation was finished you had to carry your bin to the next,
which might be a mile distant; and then perhaps it would turn out
that there was some mistake, and the set, struggling under their
bins (they weighed a hundredweight), would have to waste another
half-hour in traipsing elsewhere. Worst of all, there was the
rain. It was a bad September that year, raining one day in three.
Sometimes for a whole morning or afternoon you shivered miserably
in the shelter of the unstripped bines, with a dripping hop-poke
round your shoulders, waiting for the rain to stop. It was
impossible to pick when it was raining. The hops were too slippery
to handle, and if you did pick them it was worse than useless, for
when sodden with water they shrank all to nothing in the bin.
Sometimes you were in the fields all day to earn a shilling or
less.
This did not matter to the majority of the pickers, for quite half
of them were gypsies and accustomed to starvation wages, and most
of the others were respectable East Enders, costermongers and small
shopkeepers and the like, who came hop-picking for a holiday and
were satisfied if they earned enough for their fare both ways and a
bit of fun on Saturday nights. The farmers knew this and traded on
it. Indeed, were it not that hop-picking is regarded as a holiday,
the industry would collapse forthwith, for the price of hops is now
so low that no farmer could afford to pay his pickers a living
wage.
Twice a week you could 'sub' up to the amount of half your
earnings. If you left before the picking was finished (an
inconvenient thing for the farmers) they had the right to pay you
off at the rate of a penny a bushel instead of twopence--that is,
to pocket half of what they owed you. It was also common knowledge
that towards the end of the season, when all the pickers had a fair
sum owing to them and would not want to sacrifice it by throwing up
their jobs, the farmer would reduce the rate of payment from
twopence a bushel to a penny halfpenny. Strikes were practically
impossible. The pickers had no union, and the foremen of the sets,
instead of being paid twopence a bushel like the others, were paid
a weekly wage which stopped automatically if there was a strike;
so naturally they would raise Heaven and earth to prevent one.
Altogether, the farmers had the pickers in a cleft stick; but it
was not the farmers who were to blame--the low price of hops was
the root of the trouble. Also as Dorothy observed later, very few
of the pickers had more than a dim idea of the amount they earned.
The system of piecework disguised the low rate of payment.
For the first few days, before they could 'sub', Dorothy and Nobby
very nearly starved, and would have starved altogether if the other
pickers had not fed them. But everyone was extraordinarily kind.
There was a party of people who shared one of the larger huts a
little farther up the row, a flower-seller named Jim Burrows and a
man named Jim Turle who was vermin man at a large London restaurant,
who had married sisters and were close friends, and these people had
taken a liking to Dorothy. They saw to it that she and Nobby should
not starve. Every evening during the first few days May Turle, aged
fifteen, would arrive with a saucepan full of stew, which was
presented with studied casualness, lest there should be any hint of
charity about it. The formula was always the same:
'Please, Ellen, mother says as she was just going to throw this
stew away, and then she thought as p'raps you might like it. She
ain't got no use for it, she says, and so you'd be doing her a
kindness if you was to take it.'
It was extraordinary what a lot of things the Turles and the
Burrowses were 'just going to throw away' during those first few
days. On one occasion they even gave Nobby and Dorothy half a
pig's head ready stewed; and besides food they gave them several
cooking pots and a tin plate which could be used as a frying-pan.
Best of all, they asked no uncomfortable questions. They knew well
enough that there was some mystery in Dorothy's life--'You could
see,' they said, 'as Ellen had COME DOWN IN THE WORLD'--but they
made it a point of honour not to embarrass her by asking questions
about it. It was not until she had been more than a fortnight at
the camp that Dorothy was even obliged to put herself to the
trouble of inventing a surname.
As soon as Dorothy and Nobby could 'sub', their money troubles were
at an end. They lived with surprising ease at the rate of one and
sixpence a day for the two of them. Fourpence of this went on
tobacco for Nobby, and fourpence-halfpenny on a loaf of bread; and
they s
pent about sevenpence a day on tea, sugar, milk (you could
get milk at the farm at a halfpenny a half-pint), and margarine and
'pieces' of bacon. But, of course, you never got through the day
without squandering another penny or two. You were everlastingly
hungry, everlastingly doing sums in farthings to see whether you
could afford a kipper or a doughnut or a pennyworth of potato
chips, and, wretched as the pickers' earnings were, half the
population of Kent seemed to be in conspiracy to tickle their money
out of their pockets. The local shopkeepers, with four hundred
hop-pickers quartered upon them, made more during the hop season
than all the rest of the year put together, which did not prevent
them from looking down on the pickers as cockney dirt. In the
afternoon the farm hands would come round the bins selling apples
and pears at seven a penny, and London hawkers would come with
baskets of doughnuts or water ices or 'halfpenny lollies'. At
night the camp was thronged by hawkers who drove down from London
with vans of horrifyingly cheap groceries, fish and chips, jellied
eels, shrimps, shop-soiled cakes, and gaunt, glassy-eyed rabbits
which had lain two years on the ice and were being sold off at
ninepence a time.
For the most part it was a filthy diet upon which the hop-pickers
lived--inevitably so, for even if you had the money to buy proper
food, there was no time to cook it except on Sundays. Probably it
was only the abundance of stolen apples that prevented the camp
from being ravaged by scurvy. There was constant, systematic
thieving of apples; practically everyone in the camp either stole
them or shared them. There were even parties of young men
(employed, so it was said, by London fruit-costers) who bicycled
down from London every week-end for the purpose of raiding the
orchards. As for Nobby, he had reduced fruit-stealing to a
science. Within a week he had collected a gang of youths who
looked up to him as a hero because he was a real burglar and had
been in jail four times, and every night they would set out at dusk
with sacks and come back with as much as two hundredweight of
fruit. There were vast orchards near the hopfields, and the
apples, especially the beautiful little Golden Russets, were lying
in piles under the trees, rotting, because the farmers could not
sell them. It was a sin not to rake them, Nobby said. On two
occasions he and his gang even stole a chicken. How they managed
to do it without waking the neighbourhood was a mystery; but it
appeared that Nobby knew some dodge of slipping a sack over a
chicken's head, so that it 'ceas'd upon the midnight with no
pain'--or at any rate, with no noise.
In this manner a week and then a fortnight went by, and Dorothy was
no nearer to solving the problem of her own identity. Indeed, she
was further from it than ever, for except at odd moments the
subject had almost vanished from her mind. More and more she had
come to take her curious situation for granted, to abandon all
thoughts of either yesterday or tomorrow. That was the natural
effect of life in the hopfields; it narrowed the range of your
consciousness to the passing minute. You could not struggle with
nebulous mental problems when you were everlastingly sleepy and
everlastingly occupied--for when you were not at work in the fields
you were either cooking, or fetching things from the village, or
coaxing a fire out of wet sticks, or trudging to and fro with cans
of water. (There was only one water tap in the camp, and that was
two hundred yards from Dorothy's hut, and the unspeakable earth
latrine was at the same distance.) It was a life that wore you
out, used up every ounce of your energy, and kept you profoundly,
unquestionably happy. In the literal sense of the word, it
stupefied you. The long days in the fields, the coarse food and
insufficient sleep, the smell of hops and wood smoke, lulled you
into an almost beastlike heaviness. Your wits seemed to thicken,
just as your skin did, in the rain and sunshine and perpetual fresh
air.
On Sundays, of course, there was no work in the fields; but Sunday
morning was a busy time, for it was then that people cooked their
principal meal of the week, and did their laundering and mending.
All over the camp, while the jangle of bells from the village
church came down the wind, mingling with the thin strains of 'O God
our Help' from the ill-attended open-air service held by St
Somebody's Mission to Hop-pickers, huge faggot fires were blazing,
and water boiling in buckets and tin cans and saucepans and
anything else that people could lay their hands on, and ragged
washing fluttering from the roofs of all the huts. On the first
Sunday Dorothy borrowed a basin from the Turles and washed first
her hair, then her underclothes and Nobby's shirt. Her underclothes
were in a shocking state. How long she had worn them she did not
know, but certainly not less than ten days, and they had been slept
in all that while. Her stockings had hardly any feet left to them,
and as for her shoes, they only held together because of the mud
that caked them.
After she had set the washing to dry she cooked the dinner, and
they dined opulently off half a stewed chicken (stolen), boiled
potatoes (stolen), stewed apples (stolen), and tea out of real tea-
cups with handles on them, borrowed from Mrs Burrows. And after
dinner, the whole afternoon, Dorothy sat against the sunny side of
the hut, with a dry hop-poke across her knees to hold her dress
down, alternately dozing and reawakening. Two-thirds of the people
in the camp were doing exactly the same thing; just dozing in the
sun, and waking to gaze at nothing, like cows. It was all you felt
equal to, after a week of heavy work.
About three o'clock, as she sat there on the verge of sleep, Nobby
sauntered by, bare to the waist--his shirt was drying--with a copy
of a Sunday newspaper that he had succeeded in borrowing. It was
Pippin's Weekly, the dirtiest of the five dirty Sunday newspapers.
He dropped it in Dorothy's lap as he passed.
'Have a read of that, kid,' he said generously.
Dorothy took Pippin's Weekly and laid it across her knees, feeling
herself far too sleepy to read. A huge headline stared her in the
face: 'PASSION DRAMA IN COUNTRY RECTORY.' And then there were
some more headlines, and something in leaded type, and an inset
photograph of a girl's face. For the space of five seconds or
thereabouts Dorothy was actually gazing at a blackish, smudgy, but
quite recognizable portrait of herself.
There was a column or so of print beneath the photograph. As a
matter of fact, most of the newspapers had dropped the 'Rector's
Daughter' mystery by this time, for it was more than a fortnight
old and stale news. But Pippin's Weekly cared little whether its
news was new so long as it was spicy, and that week's crop of rapes
and murders had been a poor one. They
were giving the 'Rector's
Daughter' one final boost--giving her, in fact, the place of honour
at the top left-hand corner of the front page.
Dorothy gazed inertly at the photograph. A girl's face, looking
out at her from beds of black unappetizing print--it conveyed
absolutely nothing to her mind. She re-read mechanically the
words, 'PASSION DRAMA IN COUNTRY RECTORY', without either
understanding them or feeling the slightest interest in them. She
was, she discovered, totally unequal to the effort of reading; even
the effort of looking at the photographs was too much for her.
Heavy sleep was weighing down her head. Her eyes, in the act of
closing, flitted across the page to a photograph that was either of
Lord Snowden or of the man who wouldn't wear a truss, and then, in
the same instant, she fell asleep, with Pippin's Weekly across her
knees.
It was not uncomfortable against the corrugated iron wall of the
hut, and she hardly stirred till six o'clock, when Nobby woke her
up to tell her that he had got tea ready; whereat Dorothy put
Pippin's Weekly thriftily away (it would come in for lighting the
fire), without looking at it again. So for the moment the chance
of solving her problem passed by. And the problem might have
remained unsolved even for months longer, had not a disagreeable
accident, a week later, frightened her out of the contented and
unreflecting state in which she was living.
5
The following Sunday night two policemen suddenly descended upon
the camp and arrested Nobby and two others for theft.
It happened all in a moment, and Nobby could not have escaped
even if he had been warned beforehand, for the countryside was
pullulating with special constables. There are vast numbers of
special constables in Kent. They are sworn in every autumn--a sort
of militia to deal with the marauding tribes of hop-pickers. The
farmers had been growing tired of the orchard-robbing, and had
decided to make an example, in terrorem.
Of course there was a tremendous uproar in the camp. Dorothy came
out of her hut to discover what was the matter, and saw a firelit
ring of people towards which everyone was running. She ran after
them, and a horrid chill went through her, because it seemed to her
that she knew already what it was that had happened. She managed
to wriggle her way to the front of the crowd, and saw the very
thing that she had been fearing.
There stood Nobby, in the grip of an enormous policeman, and
another policeman was holding two frightened youths by the arms.
One of them, a wretched child hardly sixteen years old, was crying
bitterly. Mr Cairns, a stiff-built man with grey whiskers, and two
farm hands, were keeping guard over the stolen property that had
been dug out of the straw of Nobby's hut. Exhibit A, a pile of
apples; Exhibit B, some blood-stained chicken feathers. Nobby
caught sight of Dorothy among the crowd, grinned at her with a
flash of large teeth, and winked. There was a confused din of
shouting:
'Look at the pore little b-- crying! Let 'im go! Bloody shame,
pore little kid like that! Serve the young bastard right, getting
us all into trouble! Let 'im go! Always got to put the blame on
us bloody hop-pickers! Can't lose a bloody apple without it's us
that's took it. Let 'im go! Shut up, can't you? S'pose they was
YOUR bloody apples? Wouldn't YOU bloodiwell--' etc., etc., etc.
And then: 'Stand back mate! 'Ere comes the kid's mother.'
A huge Toby jug of a woman, with monstrous breasts and her hair
coming down her back, forced her way through the ring of people and
began roaring first at the policeman and Mr Cairns, then at Nobby,
who had led her son astray. Finally the farm hands managed to drag
her away. Through the woman's yells Dorothy could hear Mr Cairns
gruffly interrogating Nobby:
'Now then, young man, just you own up and tell us who you shared
them apples with! We're going to put a stop to this thieving game,