George Sturt - Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer: A Record of the Last Years of Frederick Bettesworth

TO MY FRIEND

CHARLES YOUNG

Bettesworth, the old labouring man, who in the decline of his strengthfound employment in my garden and entertained me with his talk, neverknew that he had been made the subject of a book. To know it wouldhave pleased him vastly, and there is something tragical in thereflection that he had to wear through his last weary months withoutthe consolation of the little fame he had justly earned; and yet itwould have been a mistake to tell him of it. His up-bringing had notfitted him for publicity. On the contrary, there was so much dangerthat self-consciousness would send him boastfully drinking about theparish, and make him intolerable to his familiars and useless to anyemployer, that, instead of confessing to him what I had done, I tookevery precaution to keep him in ignorance of it, and sought by leavinghim in obscurity to preserve him from ruin.

Obscure and unsuspicious he continued his work, and his pleasantgarrulity went on in its accustomed way. Queer anecdotes came from himas plentifully as ever, and shrewd observations. Now it would be ofhis harvesting in Sussex that he told; now, of an adventure with atroublesome horse, or an experience on the scaffolding of a building;and again he would gossip of his garden, or of his neighbours, or ofthe old village life, or would discuss some scrap of news picked up atthe public-house. And as this went on month after month, although Ihad no intention of adding to the first book or writing a second onthe same lines, still it happened frequently that some fragment orother of Bettesworth's conversation took my fancy and was jotted downin my note-book. But almost until the end no definite purpose informedme what to preserve and what to leave. The notes were made, for themost part, under the influence of whim only.

Towards the end, however, a sort of progression seemed to revealitself in these haphazard jottings. His age was telling heavily uponBettesworth, and symptoms of the inevitable change appeared to havebeen creeping unawares into my careless memoranda of his talk. I donot know when I first noticed this: it probably dawned upon me veryslowly; but that it did dawn is certain, and in that perception I hadthe first crude vision of the present volume. I might not aim to makeanother book after the pattern of the first, grouping the materials asit pleased me for an artistic end; but by reproducing the notes intheir proper order, and leaving them to tell their own tale, it shouldbe possible to engage as it were the co-operation of Nature herself,my own part being merely that of a scribe, recording at the dictationof events the process of Bettesworth's decay.

To this idea, formed a year or so before Bettesworth's death, I havenow tried to give shape. Unfortunately, the scribe's work was not welldone. Things that should have been written down prove to have beenoverlooked; and although in the first few chapters I have gone back toa much earlier period than was originally intended, and have preservedthe chronological order all through, the hoped-for sense ofprogression is too often wanting. It existed in my mind, in thememories which the notes called up for me, rather than inBettesworth's recorded conversations. Much explanatory comment,therefore, which I should have preferred to omit, has been introducedin order to give continuity to the narrative.

Bettesworth is spoken of throughout the book as an old man; and thatis what he appeared to be. But in fact he was aged more by wear andtear than by years. When he died, a nephew who arranged the funeralcaused the age of seventy-three to be marked on his coffin, but Ithink this was an exaggeration. The nephew's mother assured me at thetime that Bettesworth could have been no more than sixty-six. She washis sister-in-law, having married his elder brother, and so had someright to an opinion; and yet probably he was a little older than shesupposed. It is true that sixty-six is also the age one gets for him,computing it from evidence given in one chapter of this book; but thenthere is another chapter which, if it is correct, would make himsixty-seven. Against these estimates a definite statement is to beplaced. On the second of October, 1901, Bettesworth told me that itwas his birthday, and that he was sixty-four; according to which, athis death, nearly four years later, he must have been close uponsixty-eight. And this, I am inclined to think, was his true age; atany rate I cannot believe that he was younger.

At the same time, it must be allowed that his own evidence was notquite to be trusted. A man in his position, with the workhouse waitingfor him, will not make the most of his years to an employer, and Isometimes fancied that Bettesworth wished me to think him younger thanhe was. But it is quite possible that he was not himself certain ofhis own age. I have it from his sister-in-law that both his parentsdied while he was still a child, and that he, with his brothers andsisters, was taken, destitute, to the workhouse. Thence, I suppose, hewas rescued by that uncle, who kept a travelling van; and the man whocarried the boy to fairs and racecourses, and thrashed him so savagelythat at last he ran away to become Farmer Barnes's plough-boy, was nota person likely to instruct him very carefully about his age.

The point, however, is of no real importance. A labourer who has atleast the look of being old: thin, grey-eyed, quiet, with bentshoulders and patient though determined expression of facesuch isthe Bettesworth whose last years are recorded in these chapters; andit does not much matter that we should know exactly how many years ittook to reduce him to this state.

December 7, 1892.The ground in the upper part of the garden beingtoo hard frozen for Bettesworth to continue this morning the work hewas doing there yesterday, I found him some digging to do in a moresheltered corner, where the fork would enter the soil. With snowthreatening to come and stop all outdoor work, it was not well that heshould stand idle too soon.

"Oh dear!" he said one day, "we don't want no snow! We had enough o'that two winters ago. That was a fair scorcher, that was.There! Icouldn't tell anybody how we did git through. Still, we gotthrough, somehow. But there was some about here as was purty nearstarved. That poor woman as died over here t'other day...."

Here he broke off, to tell of a labourer's wife who had died in givingbirth to twins, one of whom was also dead. Including the other twin,there were seven children living. Bettesworth talked of the husband,too; but presently working round again to the bad winter of 1889-1890,he proceeded:

"I knows they" (this woman and her family) "was purty near starvin'.