| Geraldine’s life had been plain for all to see; for her farm adjoined the church, and her cows and other animals took part in Rogation. Her pretty grandchildren sing “Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale Yet will I feel none ill” in the front pew. And I talk about farmers’ wives in general, a host of them making their no-nonsense motherly way through my head.
Barry tolls the bell, Tony reads what farmer John wants us to remember about his Geraldine, and then we sing, “O, that old rugged cross, so despised by the world, Has a wondrous attraction for me”, the neglected hymn surging through the church and out to the stockyard. And then everybody gets into big cars and drives them down into the valley for the funeral feast at the inn where Constable’s barges had a rest.
Farmers’ wives have not been left out of agricultural history, but their role has been somewhat taken for granted — though not by Thomas Hardy and George Eliot. Emma Woodhouse, of course, doubted whether it would be possible for her to meet one.
I like Dorothy Hartley’s account of them in her wonderful book Lost Country Life (Pantheon, 1979). I told the congregation about it in my funeral address. It was women as well as men who made the English landscape, and who decidedly made the English country garden.
The farm labour-force has gone, but during its generations of existence it was the farmer’s wife who nurtured it, patched up its hurts, fed it, and bossed it about. Often of an evening in my ancient farmhouse, I think I hear the dairying, the bread-making, the calling, the singing, the never-ending toil. I hear the same bells and the same water-music from the stream. In the churchyard, the farmers have done their wives proud, and their names are spread out on handsome tombs.
Country deaths stir up a residual faith. It is not to be analysed, but accepted. We have to die in order to put on our immortality, I tell the understanding crowd.
The Psalmist was sad when he looked across the fields and realised that he was no more than a sojourner there, “as all our fathers were”. He is rueful because his beauty is “consumed away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment”.
And yet — I preach to this mourning, knowing assembly — farming people are lucky; for whether they followed the plough or now steer the combine, the marks they leave behind possess a certain indelible quality like no other on a local earth. This farmer’s wife and her husband John were unaware how intensely “local” their lives were — how unlike even the lives of their farming neighbours. It endeared them to us.
I read them a poem by John Clare:
Love lives beyond the tomb,
And earth, which fades like dew!
I love the fond,
The faithful, and the true.
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