Your house is all burnt, and your children all gone.
Little pop-pop sits on the cold stone,
Crying for mammy, and mammy don’t come.
I heard that rhyme very early, and shall never quite lose the forlorn sense of tragedy in it.
The ladybird is the deadly foe of the “fly,” and seems by some extraordinary instinct to know when and where that pest is rampant; for there is nothing more certain than that a plague of “fly” will be followed by an incursion of ladybirds in countless millions, coming even across the Channel, as steamboat passengers, plentifully covered with them, have testified. The sky rains ladybirds, come vengefully to exterminate the hop-grower’s enemy and to ensure that British beer shall be properly bittered.
If the hops survive all these dangers and chances and are a generally abundant crop, the grower is sometimes in almost as bad a case as if they had been a failure, for prices then rule so ruinously low that they do not pay the cost of growing. Hops have been so high as £25 a hundredweight in times of scarcity, when those fortunate enough to be favoured with a good crop, while their neighbours’ were failures, have retired with fortunes. On the other hand, they have been so low as fifty shillings.
A less anxious, but infinitely more busy time has come when the picking arrives. Responsible gangers have to be employed, and hop-cutters. The hop-cutter cuts through the bines, pulls up the poles, and lays them across the bins of sacking into which the pickers strip the flowers of the hop. The ganger measures out the stripped hops, and in his note-book credits each picker with the amount of his picking, at the rate of eight bushels a shilling.
The hopper’s hut is not the last word in convenience, although for the occasion, and by way of change from the hopper’s native slum, it may be comfortable enough. It is usually one of a long row of little brick dens, not altogether unlike some of the wild animals’ lairs at the Zoological Gardens, and is whitewashed inside in the manner of a cattle-pen. There are—is it necessary to add?—no pictures on the walls and no domestic knick-knacks. There is not even any furniture, nor a bed. If you are a hopper you doss on the floor, luxuriating in clean straw provided by the hop-grower, and wrapped in the not over-clean blankets brought by yourself; and you and yours “clean yourselves”—in these circles you do not merely “wash”—in the open, at buckets and tins. In the open, too, you dress and get shaved, and cook and eat; and if the August and September days be kind, there is enjoyment rather than discomfort in it. Sometimes barns and tents supplement the huts: sometimes, too, it rains, and then, on a really wet day, when work is at a standstill and the women and the children are miserable and sulky and cry, the male hopper—who, although as a rule he uses dreadful language, is not a bad fellow at heart—goes off to the nearest pub. and soaks on four-ale, and there is trouble.
KENT.