What, in the end, is the difference between a field of sunflowers and a field of brick-built houses? Both live for a while, both eventually die, it’s just a matter of time doling out unequally heaped bowls of itself one to the other to push the whole thing along. The rot’s different with both, sure, but nothing lasts forever. One grows by itself once the seeds have been sown and the other takes a man’s hands a lot of labour to stand tall for its allotted period. Labour and time, those are the things that count.
Luke Johnson has taken eight pay-packets and two broken love tokens from the field. One is for labour, the other is from time.
There’s been a lot of anger since it was announced that Wimpey had bought up the field. Some said it was the last beauty spot on the face of the county being levelled; a final dereliction of duty by the local wardens of the greenbelt. But there had been a rickety garage jutting out into the field as long as Jack could remember: two long and low concrete buildings with rusting doors, a swamp of a forecourt and the obliterated chassis of trucks and hatchbacks and the tops of Range Rovers. People are able to overlook ugliness when it suits them. Thirty homes won’t make for a lot more people around. The quiet won’t be too badly broken. The new commuters might even save the train station, a forlorn branch-line stop threatened with closure that the current station master has given up on. The lilacs he planted long ago in the soil boxes have rotted. They stink. A dirty protest against GWR.
It is only Luke’s second big job on a building site. Times are different now; it used to be that smart lads in the village could become models of social mobility, heading away from the farms for offices in the capitol or the county seat. Parents swore against their offspring having to sweat and suffer like them; but this western Akenfield no longer offers cannon fodder for the plush new industries because there are no plush new industries. No more silver-lit plexiglass lives. Everywhere in the county seems to be on its knees. Luke tried for a job where the last bit of money was flowing. However, he noticed the head of the local branch of the prestigious estate agents wore a signet ring on his little finger and Luke thought that a bad sign. He saw the landowners themselves wearing those sometimes, like they were all in a little cult. Luke supposed they were. The interview was over quickly. The estate agent’s brochures showed in their advertising blather the names of the schools that would have gotten Luke a job if only he could have put them on his CV. Some things have a steel ring around them, just like the city of London.
Luke counts out time via his labour. Each round of cement mixing, each new foot of stacked bricks or deepness in the foundation holes, has a portion of more-or-less precise minutes or hours fixed to it. When Luke is with the strict workers he doesn’t ever need to look at his watch. When he is with the bad it’s more tricky, but he’s managed to find the rhythms even in their chaos.
Most the rest of the men roll in in Mercedes and Ford transit vans at around five or six each morning. They come from the cheap hotels in town. Adrift and alone apart from each other, divested of an individual life for long, long stretches and underpaid, they drink and drink all night. They stagger and stumble over the site when they come in. The site managers take lines of cocaine in their jerry-built office to make sure they have the energy to carry on controlling the doing. Sometimes they share.
But Luke is okay. Okay for now. He has the money and he has the love tokens. He supposed the sunflower field hadn’t always been a sunflower field; long before it had been enclosed, he imagined, it might have been some lover’s glen or meadows, a meeting point for sweethearts just outside the confines of the village proper and on the far side from the old church. It was all fumbling in the long grass back then. Luke had heard old songs on the pubs’ Trad Nights (the area had a history for it; scholars still turned up occasionally); half of them seemed to be about men back from wars at sea or on the land, testing their betrothed’s loyalty in their absence by wearing disguises and making clumsy passes, before revealing their identity by the brandishing of half a broken token of devotion when the woman acquiesced or demurred. One of Luke’s tokens was broken in half in this manner; it was an unimpressive old copper ring, definitely worn not for show but simply for symbolism. It had a simple engraving that ran along and over the split: “When I’m gone from you”. Luke had found both halves buried together when he’d been digging; he assumed the couple had left it in the ground when their had separation ended. He liked that. It was like planting a sunflower seed.
The other token was a coin, bent inwards on the edge of each side. It had two sets of initials, overlapping in the centre of a love-heart with an arrow shot through it: A.J. and S.H. Luke had seen one like this once in the county museum on a school trip. It had fascinated him because there was nothing on it then but an engraving of a stick figure hanging from a noose, with the label ‘1814’ beneath. He’d never been able to decide on who that souvenir was for.
Luke treasured these droppings more than the real money he was collecting. He figured that would be the way for most when they dug up something deep and forgotten from the ground of their homestead. Besides, time mattered more to him than labour. He’d be labouring his whole life, no doubt, except for when things were really rough. But the labour would never be for him. He helped build nice houses for other people; nice even though they didn’t have a proper garden in order to make room for more plots on the development. Someone would build him a home or had already built it, but it would be smaller and cheaper and nastier than these. That was the way it went. But no-one ever had enough time, right at the final point, when all that labouring for others had been got through.
The love tokens were a sign that this village, maybe itself on its own long and slow deathbed with its family nowhere to be found to help support it, had held glorious life in its allotted period. Once, Luke had read that God was spread in all things; that he was in man, earth, bud, branch, cattle, beam and bell. Most people would agree that God is in a sunflower, but not in a Wimpey home. Luke wasn’t so sure of that. It all seemed much of a same to him. Men might hide that truth sometimes, but the love tokens were a reminder. There were currents of life and light beneath everything. That was pure religion; a godless God or millions, billions of Gods. Older than Christianity, that way of seeing things. On an evening a few years ago, he’d been watching a documentary on television and when the presenter started talking about “history buried in the ground”, the light that always turned itself on banged itself instead hard three times against the side of his parent’s bookcase. Knock, knock, knock. Luke thought maybe he’d find a third token, too. Things move in synchronicity in that way. They have their own strange rhythms.
Dig for Victory. That was a war slogan, emblazoned across different posters. There was a stark sepia-toned one with a boot digging a spade into a mound of earth, a spade that stood true and straight and proud to suggest to the pliant observer a nation remaining resilient; there was one with a beaming healthy farm worker in white shirt-sleeves puffing on a pipe and carrying a laden bucket of vegetables; there was another showing the back of a small child in sunhat and short trousers carrying a spade and redolent more of train company adverts for the seaside than the struggles of wartime. Luke didn’t like any of them much. The first seemed almost fascistic; the red background and the earth made him think of that ‘blood and soil’ Nazi line, which wasn’t helped by the man’s footwear being reminiscent of a jackboot. The second’s farmhand didn’t look like any that Luke had ever seen; he was a pink-cheeked gentleman in dress-up, keeping the best produce for himself. The third seemed to suggest the imminent re-introduction of child labour and the final puncturing of all daydreaming. But he liked the slogan- or, at least, he had come to, once he’d managed to shorn it of its propaganda and put it in a new place.
Dig for Victory. Aye, he could do that. He could keep on doing that. He could go on finding things. He had to. As long as he could work out what victory actually meant in the final reckoning. That was the hard part. Harder than it had been for decades, probably. That would take real time and real labour and that pure religion.
Billy Stanton is a young working-class writer and filmmaker based in London, and originally from Portsmouth. His story ‘Screwfix’ was recently published in ‘New Towns’ (Wild Pressed Books). His short fiction has also appeared in Horla, The Chamber, Tigershark and (soon) Wyldblood magazines. His latest short film ‘Noli is currently in post-production. His blog can be found at: steelcathedrals.wordpress.com
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