CHAPTER XIV--HOPS AND HOPPERS
So far has the divorcement of the worker from the soil proceeded,
that the farming districts, the civilised world over, are dependent
upon the cities for the gathering of the harvests. Then it is, when
the land is spilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk,
who have been driven away from the soil, are called back to it
again. But in England they return, not as prodigals, but as
outcasts still, as vagrants and pariahs, to be doubted and flouted
by their country brethren, to sleep in jails and casual wards, or
under the hedges, and to live the Lord knows how.
It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the
street people to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient to the
call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs
of adventure-lust still in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them
forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are
undiminished. Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls,
and the country does not want them. They are out of place. As they
drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways,
they resemble some vile spawn from underground. Their very
presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh,
bright sun and the green and growing things. The clean, upstanding
trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their
rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity of
nature.
Is the picture overdrawn? It all depends. For one who sees and
thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly
overdrawn. But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood
and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly
wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a
millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself
with the sensuous delights of London's golden theatres, hobnobs with
lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king. Wins his
spurs--God forbid! In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the
battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to chine.
And, after all, it is finer to kill a strong man with a clean-
slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast of him, and of
his seed through the generations, by the artful and spidery
manipulation of industry and politics.
But to return to the hops. Here the divorcement from the soil is as
apparent as in every other agricultural line in England. While the
manufacture of beer steadily increases, the growth of hops steadily
decreases. In 1835 the acreage under hops was 71,327. To-day it
stands at 48,024, a decrease of 3103 from the acreage of last year.
Small as the acreage is this year, a poor summer and terrible storms
reduced the yield. This misfortune is divided between the people
who own hops and the people who pick hops. The owners perforce must
put up with less of the nicer things of life, the pickers with less
grub, of which, in the best of times, they never get enough. For
weary weeks headlines like the following have appeared in the London
papers.-
TRAMPS PLENTIFUL, BUT THE HOPS ARE FEW AND NOT YET READY.
Then there have been numberless paragraphs like this:-
From the neighbourhood of the hop fields comes news of a distressing
nature. The bright outburst of the last two days has sent many
hundreds of hoppers into Kent, who will have to wait till the fields
are ready for them. At Dover the number of vagrants in the
workhouse is treble the number there last year at this time, and in
other towns the lateness of the season is responsible for a large
increase in the number of casuals.
To cap their wretchedness, when at last the picking had begun, hops
and hoppers were well-nigh swept away by a frightful storm of wind,
rain, and hail. The hops were stripped clean from the poles and
pounded into the earth, while the hoppers, seeking shelter from the
stinging hail, were close to drowning in their huts and camps on the
low-lying ground. Their condition after the storm was pitiable,
their state of vagrancy more pronounced than ever; for, poor crop
that it was, its destruction had taken away the chance of earning a
few pennies, and nothing remained for thousands of them but to "pad
the hoof" back to London.
"We ayn't crossin'-sweepers," they said, turning away from the
ground, carpeted ankle-deep with hops.
Those that remained grumbled savagely among the half-stripped poles
at the seven bushels for a shilling--a rate paid in good seasons
when the hops are in prime condition, and a rate likewise paid in
bad seasons by the growers because they cannot afford more.
I passed through Teston and East and West Farleigh shortly after the
storm, and listened to the grumbling of the hoppers and saw the hops
rotting on the ground. At the hothouses of Barham Court, thirty
thousand panes of glass had been broken by the hail, while peaches,
plums, pears, apples, rhubarb, cabbages, mangolds, everything, had
been pounded to pieces and torn to shreds.
All of which was too bad for the owners, certainly; but at the
worst, not one of them, for one meal, would have to go short of food
or drink. Yet it was to them that the newspapers devoted columns of
sympathy, their pecuniary losses being detailed at harrowing length.
"Mr. Herbert L- calculates his loss at 8000 pounds;" "Mr. F-, of
brewery fame, who rents all the land in this parish, loses 10,000
pounds;" and "Mr. L-, the Wateringbury brewer, brother to Mr.
Herbert L-, is another heavy loser." As for the hoppers, they did
not count. Yet I venture to assert that the several almost-square
meals lost by underfed William Buggles, and underfed Mrs. Buggles,
and the underfed Buggles kiddies, was a greater tragedy than the
10,000 pounds lost by Mr. F-. And in addition, underfed William
Buggles' tragedy might be multiplied by thousands where Mr. F-'s
could not be multiplied by five.
To see how William Buggles and his kind fared, I donned my seafaring
togs and started out to get a job. With me was a young East London
cobbler, Bert, who had yielded to the lure of adventure and joined
me for the trip. Acting on my advice, he had brought his "worst
rags," and as we hiked up the London road out of Maidstone he was
worrying greatly for fear we had come too ill-dressed for the
business.
Nor was he to be blamed. When we stopped in a tavern the publican
eyed us gingerly, nor did his demeanour brighten till we showed him
the colour of our cash. The natives along the coast were all
dubious; and "bean-feasters" from London, dashing past in coaches,
cheered and jeered and shouted insulting things after us. But
before we were done with the Maidstone district my friend found that
we were as well clad, if not better, than the average hopper. Some
of the bunches of rags we chanced upon were marvellous.
"The tide is out," called a gypsy-looking woman to her mates, as we
came up a long row of bins into which the pickers were stripping the
hops.
"Do you twig?" Bert whispered. "She's on to you."
I twigged. And it must be confessed the figure was an apt one.
When the tide is out boats are left on the beach and do not sail,
and a sailor, when the tide is out, does not sail either. My
seafaring togs and my presence in the hop field proclaimed that I
was a seaman without a ship, a man on the beach, and very like a
craft at low water.
"Can yer give us a job, governor?" Bert asked the bailiff, a kindly
faced and elderly man who was very busy.
His "No" was decisively uttered; but Bert clung on and followed him
about, and I followed after, pretty well all over the field.
Whether our persistency struck the bailiff as anxiety to work, or
whether he was affected by our hard-luck appearance and tale,
neither Bert nor I succeeded in making out; but in the end he
softened his heart and found us the one unoccupied bin in the place-
-a bin deserted by two other men, from what I could learn, because
of inability to make living wages.
"No bad conduct, mind ye," warned the bailiff, as he left us at work
in the midst of the women.
It was Saturday afternoon, and we knew quitting time would come
early; so we applied ourselves earnestly to the task, desiring to
learn if we could at least make our salt. It was simple work,
woman's work, in fact, and not man's. We sat on the edge of the
bin, between the standing hops, while a pole-puller supplied us with
great fragrant branches. In an hour's time we became as expert as
it is possible to become. As soon as the fingers became accustomed
automatically to differentiate between hops and leaves and to strip
half-a-dozen blossoms at a time there was no more to learn.
We worked nimbly, and as fast as the women themselves, though their
bins filled more rapidly because of their swarming children, each of
which picked with two hands almost as fast as we picked.
" Don'tcher pick too clean, it's against the rules," one of the
women informed us; and we took the tip and were grateful.
As the afternoon wore along, we realised that living wages could not
be made--by men. Women could pick as much as men, and children
could do almost as well as women; so it was impossible for a man to
compete with a woman and half-a-dozen children. For it is the woman
and the half-dozen children who count as a unit, and by their
combined capacity determine the unit's pay.
"I say, matey, I'm beastly hungry," said I to Bert. We had not had
any dinner.
"Blimey, but I could eat the 'ops," he replied.
Whereupon we both lamented our negligence in not rearing up a
numerous progeny to help us in this day of need. And in such
fashion we whiled away the time and talked for the edification of
our neighbours. We quite won the sympathy of the pole-puller, a
young country yokel, who now and again emptied a few picked blossoms
into our bin, it being part of his business to gather up the stray
clusters torn off in the process of pulling.
With him we discussed how much we could "sub," and were informed
that while we were being paid a shilling for seven bushels, we could
only "sub," or have advanced to us, a shilling for every twelve
bushels. Which is to say that the pay for five out of every twelve
bushels was withheld--a method of the grower to hold the hopper to
his work whether the crop runs good or bad, and especially if it
runs bad.
After all, it was pleasant sitting there in the bright sunshine, the
golden pollen showering from our hands, the pungent aromatic odour
of the hops biting our nostrils, and the while remembering dimly the
sounding cities whence these people came. Poor street people! Poor
gutter folk! Even they grow earth-hungry, and yearn vaguely for the
soil from which they have been driven, and for the free life in the
open, and the wind and rain and sun all undefiled by city smirches.
As the sea calls to the sailor, so calls the land to them; and, deep
down in their aborted and decaying carcasses, they are stirred
strangely by the peasant memories of their forbears who lived before
cities were. And in incomprehensible ways they are made glad by the
earth smells and sights and sounds which their blood has not
forgotten though unremembered by them.
"No more 'ops, matey," Bert complained.
It was five o'clock, and the pole-pullers had knocked off, so that
everything could be cleaned up, there being no work on Sunday. For
an hour we were forced idly to wait the coming of the measurers, our
feet tingling with the frost which came on the heels of the setting
sun. In the adjoining bin, two women and half-a-dozen children had
picked nine bushels: so that the five bushels the measurers found
in our bin demonstrated that we had done equally well, for the half-
dozen children had ranged from nine to fourteen years of age.
Five bushels! We worked it out to eight-pence ha'penny, or
seventeen cents, for two men working three hours and a half.
Fourpence farthing apiece! a little over a penny an hour! But we
were allowed only to "sub" fivepence of the total sum, though the
tally-keeper, short of change, gave us sixpence. Entreaty was in
vain. A hard-luck story could not move him. He proclaimed loudly
that we had received a penny more than our due, and went his way.
Granting, for the sake of the argument, that we were what we
represented ourselves to be--namely, poor men and broke--then here
was out position: night was coming on; we had had no supper, much
less dinner; and we possessed sixpence between us. I was hungry
enough to eat three sixpenn'orths of food, and so was Bert. One
thing was patent. By doing 16.3 per cent. justice to our stomachs,
we would expend the sixpence, and our stomachs would still be
gnawing under 83.3 per cent. injustice. Being broke again, we could
sleep under a hedge, which was not so bad, though the cold would sap
an undue portion of what we had eaten. But the morrow was Sunday,
on which we could do no work, though our silly stomachs would not
knock off on that account. Here, then, was the problem: how to get
three meals on Sunday, and two on Monday (for we could not make
another "sub" till Monday evening).
We knew that the casual wards were over-crowded; also, that if we
begged from farmer or villager, there was a large likelihood of our
going to jail for fourteen days. What was to be done? We looked at
each other in despair -
- Not a bit of it. We joyfully thanked God that we were not as
other men, especially hoppers, and went down the road to Maidstone,
jingling in our pockets the half-crowns and florins we had brought
from London.
