So his work varies, week after week. From one job to another up and down the valley he goes, not listlessly and fatigued, but taking a sober interest in all he does. You can see in him very well how his forefathers went about their affairs, for he is plainly a man after their pattern. His day's work is his day's pleasure. It is changeful enough, and calls for skill enough, to make it enjoyable to him. Furthermore, things on either side of it—things he learnt to understand long ago—make their old appeal to his senses as he goes about, although his actual work is not concerned with them. In the early summer—he had come to mow a little grass plot for me—I found him full of a boyish delight in birds and birds'-nests. A pair of interesting birds had arrived; at any time in the day they could be seen swooping down from the branch of a certain apple-tree and back again to their starting-place without having touched the ground. "Flycatchers!" said Turner exultantly. "I shall ha' to look about. They got their nest somewhere near, you may be sure o' that! A little wisp o' grass somewhere in the clunch (fork) of a tree ..." (his glance wandered speculatively round in search of a likely place) "that's where they builds. Ah! look now! There he goes again! Right in the clunch you'll find their nest, and as many as ten young 'uns in'n.... Yes, I shall be bound to find where he is afore I done with it."
The next day, hard by where he was at work, an exclamation of mine drew him to look at a half-fledged bird, still alive, lying at the foot of a nut-tree. "H'm: so 'tis. A young blackbird," he said pitifully. The next moment he had the bird in his hand. "Where can the nest be, then? Up in that nut? Well, to be sure! Wonders I hadn't seen that afore now. That's it though, 'pend upon it; right up in the clunch o' that bough." Before I could say a word he was half-way up amongst the branches, long-legged and struggling, to put the bird back into its nest.
As he has always lived in the valley, he is full of memories of it, and especially early memories; recalling the comparative scantiness of its population when he was a boy, and the great extent of the common; and the warm banks where hedgehogs abounded—hedgehogs which his father used to kill and cook; and the wells of good water, so few and precious that each had its local name. For instance, "Butcher's Well" (so-called to this day, he says) "was where Jack Butcher used to live, what was shepherd for Mr. Warner up there at Manley Bridge." At eight years old he was sent out on to the common to mind cows; at ten he was thought big enough to be helpful to his father, at piece-work in the hop-grounds; and in due time he began to go "down into Sussex" with his father and others for the harvesting. His very first experience there was of a wet August, when the men could earn no money and were reduced to living on bread and apples; but other years have left him with happier memories of that annual outing. "Old Sussex!" he laughed once in appreciative reminiscence—"Old Sussex! Them old hills! I did use to have a appetite there! I could eat anything.... You could go to the top of a hill and look down one way and p'raps not see more'n four or five places (houses or farmsteads), and look t'other way and mebbe not be able to see e'er a one at all. Oh, a reg'lar wild, out-o'-th'-way place 'twas." On this farm, to which his gang went year after year, the farmer "didn't pay very high—you couldn't expect'n to. But he used to treat us very well. Send out great puddin's for us two or three times a week, and cider, and bread-an'-cheese.... Nine rabbits old Fisher the roadman out here says 'twas, but I dunno 'bout that, but I knows 'twas as many as seven, the farmer put into one puddin' for us. There was a rabbit for each man, be how 'twill. In a great yaller basin...." Turner held out his arms to illustrate a large circumference.
In the time of his prosperity the main of his work was with his own horse and cart, so that I know him to have had considerable experience in that way; and I recollect, too, his being at plough in one of the slanting gardens of this valley, not with his horse—the ground was too steep for that—but with two donkeys harnessed to a small plough which he kept especially for such work. Truly it would be hard to "put him out," hard to find him at a loss, in anything connected with country industry. He spoilt some sea-kale for me once, admitting, however, before he began that he was not very familiar with its management; but that is the only matter of its kind in which I have proved him inefficient. To see him putting young cabbage-plants in rows is to realize what a fine thing it is to know the best way of going to work, even at such a simple-seeming task as that; and I would not undertake to count in how many such things he is proficient.
One day he was telling me an anecdote of his taking honey from an old-fashioned straw beehive; another day the talk was of pruning fruit-trees. I had shown him an apple—the first one to be picked from a young tree—and he at once named it correctly as a "Blenheim Orange," recognizing it by its "eye," whereupon I asked a question or two, and, finally, if he understood pruning. There came his customary laugh, while his eyes twinkled, as if the question amused him, as if I might have known that he understood pruning. "Yes, I've done it many's a time. Grape vines, too." Who taught him? "Oh, 'twas my old uncle made me do that. He was laid up one time—'twas when I was eighteen year old—and he says to me: 'You'll ha' to do it. Now's your time to learn....' Of course he showed me how. So 'twas he as showed me how to thatch.... My father never knowed how to do thatchin', nor anythink else much. He was mostly hop-ground. He done a little mowin', of course." Equally of course, the father had reaped and harvested, and kept pigs and cows, and a few odd things besides; nevertheless, being chiefly a wage-earner, "he never knowed much," and it was to the uncle that the lad owed his best training.
From talk of the uncle, and of the uncle's cows, of which he had charge for a time, he drifted off to mention a curious piece of old thrift connected with the common, and practised apparently for some time after the enclosure. There was a man he knew in those now remote days who fed his cows for a part of the year on furze, or "fuzz," as we call it here. Two acres of furze he had, which he cut close in alternate years, the second year's growth making a fine juicy fodder when chopped small into a sort of chaff. An old hand-apparatus for that purpose—a kind of chaff-cutting box—was described to me. The same man had a horse, which also did well on furze diet mixed with a little malt from the man's own beer-brewing.
To the lore derived from his uncle and others, Turner has added much by his own observation—not, of course, intentional observation scientifically verified, but that shrewd and practical folk-observation, if I may so call it, by which in the course of generations the rural English had already garnered such a store of mingled knowledge and error. So he knows, or thinks he knows, why certain late-bearing apple-trees have fruit only every other year, and what effect on the potato crop is caused by dressing our sandy soil with chalk or lime; so he watches the new mole-runs, or puzzles to make out what birds they can be that peck the ripening peas out of the pods, or estimates the yield of oats to the acre by counting the sheaves that he stacks, or examines the lawn to see what kinds of grass are thriving. About all such matters his talk is the talk of an experienced man habitually interested in his subject, and yet it is never obtrusive. The remarks fall from him casually; you feel, too, that while he is telling you something that he noticed yesterday or years ago his eyes are alert to seize any new detail that may seem worthy of attention. Details are always really his subject, for the generalizations he sometimes offers are built on the flimsiest foundation of but one or two observed facts. But I am not now concerned with the value of his observations for themselves; the point is that to him they are so interesting. He is a man who seems to enjoy his life with an undiminished zest from morning to night. It is doubtful if the working hours afford, to nine out of ten modern and even "educated" men, such a constant refreshment of acceptable incidents as Turner's hours bring to him.
He is perhaps the best specimen of the old stock now left in the valley; but it must not be thought that he is singular. Others there are not very unlike him; and all that one hears of them goes to prove that the old cottage thrift, whatever its limitations may have been, did at least make the day's work interesting enough to a man, without his needing to care about leisure evenings. Turner, for his part, does not value them at all. In the winter he is often in bed before seven o'clock.