More interest from this other, prosperous-looking farmer.
"Farming," he told me gravely, "was no life for a man in this country until just lately. An existence, that was all. All the food we ought to have grown came in from over the sea. Agriculture, before the war, was simply hand to mouth, hand to mouth." He looked at his wife and added: "If it hadn't been for pedigree poultry and shire horses the farmers would have starved."
His wife nodded across the table; she was the sort of small, dainty little woman that you would expect that great-framed man to choose; her thick hair was prematurely grey, and her well-cut and tiny features, though composed, seemed as if they had looked on struggles in her time.
Then came something that, though it was only talk at a farmhouse table, was significant. It made me think. This new problem of my life on the land was full of old problems to others. Across that liberally-spread board that farmer's wife launched an astonishing remark.
"We nearly starved," she said, "when we were children in my father's time. One New Year he made up his accounts and he was down a thousand pounds. The next year again he was down a thousand. And the third year again he had lost another thousand. That January, I remember, he did not speak for a week."
Her soft voice shook. The faces of the Land Girls were all turned towards her, listening, surprised.
"Then," continued Mrs. Price, "he came into our nursery and said, 'Children, I'm broke. The dear old home will have to go.'"
Here the Land Girl Sybil put in gently:
"But you told me your brother had that farm now. So you didn't have to leave, Mrs. Price?"
"No! Because of my father fighting for it. He borrowed money at very high interest and went in for shire horses. In ten years he was just feeling his feet again. It was twenty years before he paid off everything. That was a struggle. Those were the hard times for farmers. It makes me feel bitter now, girls, when they say farmers are 'grasping,' and 'make money hand over fist,' just because the tide has turned at last, and farming isn't the terribly losing game it was!"