Farming Adventures
This Farming Business. By Frank Sykes. (Faber & Faber. Ss. 6d.) The Farm in the Fen. By Alan Bloom. (Faber & Faber. xos. 6d.) FARMERS of all sorts seem suddenly to have decided that the pen is greater than the plough. They have begun to write " shop " with no little gusto, and, what is more, the public reads it all with gusto. A good many of these books come from converts, from young people who have plunged with new ideas into a profession new both to them and their class. Of these vocal recruits Mr. Sykes is perhaps the very best example. He is the son of a well-known soldier and explorer. He went to a public school and left it not only to farm, but to farm in a big way. His Wiltshire is a pioneer county both in literature and technique. Of Wiltshire Mr. Street wrote his masterpiece, Farmer's Glory, and on Wiltshire Downs Mr. Hosier has exercised with profit to the whole industry his genius for invention. Mr. Sykes has taken in hand over 3,000 acres of this most agricultural country, and has come to believe in the necessity of a new sort of farmer, farm labourer, and, indeed, distributor. He preaches a most severe and serious sermon on these heads ; and his book must be read not at all like Mr. Street's, for pleasure, but for the sheer doctrine. He writes with good sense, clarity and force. He has received much good advice, largely perhaps from Mr. Stapleton's school, and profited. The book might be strongly recommended if it were not that in his zeal for a highly educated farmer, who is also a good business man, he un- wisely belittles and condemns the small farm and the family farm, and the return to local markets. There is not enough past in his future, and too much sermon in his story.
Contrasted with him, Mr. Bloom concentrates on his story, the account of a vigorous act of reclamation in a bit of rough fenland alongside Wicken Fen, a little virgin acreage as famous as any England. His struggles with water, with bog-oak, not to mention with the National Trust, recall vividly to those who know the neighbourhood and its history the early reclamations by Jacobite kings and dukes of Bedford and Dutch engineers. As he grew into farmer from horticulturist he has concerned himself with just that sort of farming which Mr. Sykes disregards, and his almost exciting account of his struggle and its triumph is accompanied with much wise information on the art of production and harvesting. Lovers of the Fens will delight in the atmosphere of the tale, and as a small local achievement the taking of Adventurer's Fen may be com- pared with the conquest of " Poverty Bottom." Both names are
Previous page
