Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

This shepherd is the true breed. His father was a shepherd on the same farm; his grandfather was a shepherd on the same farm. His name is drawn from his calling: not exactly Penfold, but akin. He is sixty-six, and he has been out in all weathers on the South Downs ever since he was a child, and he has never had a cold in his life. His crook is never out of his hand. When it rains he carries also a faded green umbrella and an ancient military cloak lined with red. He still wears a smock. He has never been to London, but knows Brighton railway station. He cannot read or write.

The older I grow the more respect I have for the wise people who cannot read or write. The shepherd cannot read or write, yet conversation with him is as natural as if he knew all the jargons. I never find myself (who have both read and written more than is good for any one) hunting for words within his vocabulary. He has a sly, glancing humour that would make the fortune of an author, and observing eyes that would make the fortune of two. He misses nothing; and, having nothing to confuse and congest his mind, he has forgotten nothing.

He describes well; but his adjectives are very few: “tidy” and “middling” for ordinary praise, “out-an’-out” for eulogy. His Bible at home is “out-an’-out old”; his watch “out-an’-out big.” Where you and I say we will consider it, he says “insider.” He is that rare thing in a Southern county, an independent labourer. The vicar met him not long since, remarking that he had not seen him lately. “No, I beänt much pestered by parsons,” he replied. I can think of no more disconcerting reply to a kindly question; but it was not cruelly meant. It merely comes to this, that his attitude to the world is defensive.

He regrets many things that are no more, not the least being the days when wheatears were still eaten and the shepherds had in August an easy way of adding to their very scanty wages by trapping these little plump birds and selling them to the Brighton poulterers. But that is all done with, and the only opportunity of earning a little extra money that he now has is by stopping earths for the hunt just before the meet; which to me seems to be not quite playing the game.

He looks back, too, to the smuggling days with a certain wistfulness; not that he did any himself, but he could not help knowing what was going on, and he remembers more than one exciting arrest; while his grandmother, over at Lullington, near Alfriston, was always well in with the smugglers, and once went so far as to conceal some tubs under her skeps, which the Revenue officer never thought of searching, partly, no doubt, for fear of the bees. But the shepherd has the same tale as the fisherman in the Georgian town—the same tale, although the fisherman represents the sea-smugglers and the shepherd the land-smugglers. The end of smuggling, they both say, was not so much the vigilance of the coastguard as the prevalence of the informer. Small village life in Sussex and along the coast in the early years of Victoria seems to have been ruined by the presence of informers. A good field for a novelist here! For the most part those writers who have dealt with smuggling, from G. P. R. James to Mr. Meade Falkner, have confined themselves to its perils and triumphs; but the tale-bearer is perhaps better material—psychologically at any rate. Anyway, it was the tale-bearer who prevailed, and bit by bit the old, alluring, dangerous game was dropped. “The man who lived in the cottage next to you,” says the shepherd, “was a rare smuggler. He did more work at night than ever he did by day, though he had to show up in the fields just to keep them from being too suspicious.”

Although the shepherd has never been to London, he has done some travelling; but that, too, is a thing of the past. Once he used to take his lambs to the great Sussex “ship fairs” to be sold—to Lindfield and the “Bat and Ball” at Chiddingly, and so forth. But now that ancient custom also has gone, so far as he is concerned, for the new farmer prefers to offer them by auction at the nearest town; and the boy can drive them there. “A foolish boy,” the shepherd finds him, “always thinking of something else instead of the ship. Book-learning, I suppose.”

Mus Penfold, although mostly smiling and detached, has his anxieties too—and during the lambing season this year (1911) he has been bowed with care. For the weather’s hand was against him the whole time. I saw him continually throughout this trying period and for the first time realized not only how sound a man he is, but how many qualities the good shepherd needs. For he must be good doctor, good midwife and good nurse, apart from flock management altogether; and he must be prepared for little sleep, and the exercise of boundless patience and resignation. The lambs were born just across the road; and I was on that side almost as much as this.

“Well, shepherd, how many now?” “’Bout sixty, I reckon.” “How many twins?” “Eight couple o’ twins. There’s two you could put in your waistcoat-pocket. I’ll show you.” And I followed him through the straw of the shed, now divided into little hurdled cubicles, like a dormitory, with a mother and child in each, to the barn, where he picked up by the fore-legs two of the forlornest little objects you ever saw. “Reckon they’ll die,” he said. “I’ve been feeding them, but I reckon they’ll die. They’re out-an’-out miserable.”

Owing to the cold winds far too many did die; but there was “a big six hundred,” as the shepherd said, by the time all were in this green world. When a lamb died Mus Penfold removed its skin and placed it on the back of another for whom a foster-mother was needed. Then he put the living one thus clad into the pen with the bereaved mother, who, smelling its skin and finding it true, adopted the changeling without a murmur. The skin is fitted on rather ingeniously, with the living lamb’s legs through holes left for them and the neck tied with string; but it would take in no one with any intelligence. Either sheep are very incurious or the maternal instinct makes them careless, for the deception almost always succeeds. On the other hand, the maternal instinct can fail utterly; and there were usually one or two sheep whose heads had to be tied close to the hurdle to prevent them butting their lambs away.

This lambing season, by the way, was the only time when I ever saw the shepherd using his crook. As I have said, he carries it with him all the year—in fact, it is as inseparably his as the emblem of a Saint; but he never ordinarily uses it except as a staff or a gentle chastener of his dogs. But lately it was busy. I found him dragging newborn lambs over the straw with it, from the yard to the maternity ward, while he carried another by its fore-legs. The act looks, if not exactly cruel, at any rate thoughtless; but this is not so, for the shepherd is a tender man.