How long that would be was one of the problems that Bertrand had sent me to solve.
“So long as the price of wheat stops where it is,” one of Violet’s tenant-farmers told me, “I can make a living. Of course, if her ladyship raises my rent . . .” He complained of the wages that had to be paid nowadays to old men and boys for a third of the work that was done before the war. “I can’t reduce them,” he added. “Why, d’you know, sir, what a pair of good boots costs you in Chepstow to-day?”
I have forgotten the figure; but, when I had occasion to make a few purchases, the shop-keepers apologized for their charges. The cost of labour and materials had gone up; but you could not reduce them when living was so expensive.
“A loaf of bread nowadays . . .” began the bootmaker who was oppressing the tenant-farmer’s labourer, who was keeping up the price of bread.
Then he muttered something about “middlemen” and “profiteers”.
At the other end of the scale, Violet Loring deferred making any improvements on the Chepstow estate until her tenants paid a rent commensurate with the high cost of labour and material. She was a rich woman, by the standard of gross income; but she had three houses in England, a palace in Scotland and a derelict barrack in Ireland. The greater part of her income was derived from coal; and the latest strike-cloud was being illuminated terrifyingly with lightning-forks that spelt ‘nationalization’. In one paper I read that some Angevin king, with more generosity than geography, had granted to Sir Humfrey de Loringe certain lands that were his by right of seizure alone; the paper—and I with it—knew of no service by Sir Humfrey to the community at large that justified this grant in perpetuity; and, if right of seizure was the basis of the Loring estates in one century, right of seizure—it was suggested—might be the means of expropriating the Lorings in another.
“I don’t think there’ll be any confiscation in my time,” said Violet, “but I have to think of Sandy.”
And her surplus income was therefore being invested in various securities of various foreign countries, in the hope that all would not default at the same moment.
As I moved to houses less well endowed than my cousin’s, I found the uneasiness more marked. The Knightriders, taking early advantage of the boom in real estate, had sold their house in Raglan to a rich colliery-proprietor; John Carstairs, when we went to stay with him at Herrig, said that, after this experimental year, he would have to let the shooting; and our visit to Philip Hornbeck in Yorkshire had to be cancelled because his wife had suggested a general reduction of wages and his servants had left her in a body without notice.
“Insecurity is the first, universal quality of the times,” I wrote to my uncle.