What times those were! Wages were low, but then a labourer got many things cheap which others got dear; for the making of a linen smock he paid a woman half-a-crown, while a farmer had to pay four shillings, and the smocking was the same. Also, in his worst days, if he and his family had nothing on the table but turnip and bread, he had given away two hundred seed potatoes to a man who praised them. Besides, those were the “old-fashioned times,” and in fifty or sixty years of toil, suffering and, at length, some leisure, he has proved to himself that they were good. “Some think,” said a passer-by to him, “that the old-fashioned times were better than these?”
“Think!” said he, “I know they were.” For surely they were, since it was then that he used to drive a glorious coach twice a week to London and now he does not; and in those days there were “good people” in the little town under the mill, and you knew who they were and their grandfathers too, but who are they now?
And yet, he says, there used to be a great deal less pride. In his young days the farmers and their sons went to church and sang in the choir in their clean white smocks; but now the church is like a gentleman’s conservatory. “And, lord! where are the gentlemen now? Many a gentleman looks like an ordinary man about here, and there’s many an ordinary man looks like a gentleman. That means a lot of awkwardness for those that care. Now, in the old-fashioned times, we knew a gentleman as soon as we could walk. There was the old squire! He used to expect us to sing carols outside his windows on Christmas Eve! then he would ask us into the hall and give us good mulled ale and a shilling apiece—and how he did give it! Not like a fellow putting a halfpenny into the collection, nor like your good old lady’s giving you a pair of gloves too small for you and a tract, as much as to say it is more blessed to give than to receive; but his look was as good as his shilling and made you want to sing, and I believe the old gentleman could no more have done without us than we could do without him.”
He is simply a memory with a voice, both of them slightly aided by a present of whisky from an old employer, and in the sun of April he sprouts like any cottager’s garden with alyssum and tulips.
Food is a great subject with him, and especially roast pork, from which it is perhaps fair to conclude that it was not often to be had. One bout of it he often recalls. He was still in his prime, a big man of fifty, and though he had been threshing all the morning—“it is a good many ups and downs of the flail to a pound of pork,” he says—he had eaten no food and he had none by him and there was none in the house. Presently hunger so far mastered him that he stopped work and took a walk round the farmyard. There he saw a fat pig lying on his side, heavy and making bacon rapidly. In a short time he had laid his plans: lifting up his flail he began to thresh the pig, and shouting above its screams: “Son of a fool, I’ll teach you to eat my dinner.” Nor did he cease to beat the pig and to upbraid it for stealing his dinner until the farmer came out and, pitying his case, sent him out a dish of roast pork to make amends. Then he tells a story to celebrate the incomparable joys of such a dish. An old woman had died and two young wives came to lay her out. After doing their work, they sat down on the bed, talking of many matters. Soon they fell to discussing pork. One said that it was best in the middle of the day; the other that it was best at night; and the debate was hot and threatened to be long, when the corpse rose straight up in the bed and said in a gentle voice that it was good at all times, then lay back in peace and never moved again.
But it was wonderful how much could be done without pork. He and two other men had mowed a seven-acre field of grass, all but a bit,—and a good crop,—in one long day, eating nothing but bread and cheese, and drinking two gallons of new ale apiece. They began at half-past two in the morning, one of them having cleared the edges the night before with an old scythe, because the ground was rough there with sticks and stones. They moved in échelon up the field, he as the strongest mower coming last in the row, so that he could always keep them up to their work; for they had to keep ahead of him lest his swathes should fall over their unmown grass. At five they had the first meal, hardly sitting down to it, for fear of losing time; then again at nine they ate, and so on through the day. The rule for eating and drinking was never to wait until they were really hungry or thirsty, thus avoiding the necessity for a heavy meal and some rest. At first, he said, they talked all the time, especially when they were carrying back their scythes to begin a fresh swathe at the bottom of the field; but gradually their talk grew less and less, and they finished in silence at half-past nine. He recalled with pride that when he first mowed barley, being a strong man, he used to take three more drills in his swing than the other man, but in a day’s work he had lost ground and he had to give up the conceit.
But he is proudest of his coaching years and especially of one day. It was a very fine April. The snakebirds or wrynecks were screaming all along the road as he set out. The horses were all shining, the white windmills were turning with mad, downward plunges “fit to make you mad.” So at the first stop, which was ten minutes, off he went, and sure enough in the first shaw he came to he heard the cuckoo, and as there was a big shallow pond in the heart of the trees, all warm with sun, he stripped and bathed, rejoicing all the time with the thought that he would be able to drive the horses as fast as he liked to make up for the delay. He could have ridden a cow that day. He felt so proud that he wanted to run down some foxhounds that crossed the road before him, and all the way to London the horses’ hoofs beat out his name—“Peter Durrant! Peter Durrant!”—as they had never done before. Nowadays, he says, there is not a pair of horses, that does not clatter: “Poor pluck to-day! Poor pluck to-day!” which is what a team of plough horses used to sing in his day, as they went home in the afternoon. But so strong is his belief in the old days—to which he belonged—from which he is an exile in a foreign field—that he is never sad as he sits in the sun. He condescends to live on with just such an air as when an old man lays his hand on a boy’s shoulder and encourages him. From his conspicuous life he is rather well known, and it happened once that a poet with a command of large margins once made some verses after some misfortune had befallen him and recited them to the old man by the wayside. “That is wonderful,” said Peter, “wonderful! How ever did you think of all those things about a poor old man like me? But ’tis lucky, sir, that you were not the sufferer, or those beautiful things would never have been written, for I could never have thought of them myself.”
For the rest, he collects herbs and with the help of Culpeper and some little experiment concocts fragrant ointments and dark, painful draughts in which a dozen flavours conflict; nor has he ever killed a man: he takes them himself. He will bury his nose in a fragrant posy brought home by the children and say gravely, and I think with some dark wisdom, “Why, they must be good for something,” and deeply inhaling, he continues, “At least they are good for old age.” And his own old age he attributes to the diet of living tadpoles which he used against a decline, fifty years ago.