Ronald Blythe

An extract from At the Yeoman's House

Floors

Ceilings and walls are rarely touched, floors and latches have been intimately touched every day for centuries. Here they show the touching. Other than the polished boards in the Victorianised parlour, the entire ground floor is bricked. Herring-bone pattern in what was the Elizabethan kitchen, English-bond everywhere else. Both wood and brick floors were a sensational advance on the mud floors which were laid down when the farmhouse was built, and people were very proud of them. The poet George Crabbe, courting Miss Elmy, heard her mother shouting at a new servant, 'What, the likes of you scrub bricks like these!' And he watched her fall on her knees in a baptising that was worthy of them. Cottage 'restorers' in the fifties pulled them up and threw them out. It was the first thing they did. The second was to lay concrete for the fitted carpet. It was from then on that, for the first time, the timeless intimacy between flesh and floor ceased.

Now and then, in a Mrs Elmy mood, I scrub a brick floor. It comes up a primrose white and sometimes the grasses on which the bricks were set to dry appear on the wet surface, and reveal a ghostly Georgian sunshine. The bricks are thin and heavy. Some sit tight, others have shifted and have become musical, giving out elfin zylophonic notes when they are trodden. 'You want to get them bricks fixed'. But I like brick music. I first listened to it in a Suffolk brickfield as the men, their hands bandaged in leather strips, loaded new bricks onto barrows. The most favoured were Suffolk Whites. They chimed all the way to the building site. Now and then I feel them shifting under a rug like living things, this time soundlessly. I should get them fixed. But there comes a moment in life when mending stops. When I brought some house failure to its previous owner, his answer was always the same. 'It will see me out.' This is what the farmhouse did for five hundred years, see its owners out.

For much longer than this almost every dwelling, palaces even, had mud floors. Here is Mr Robert Edmunds' recipe for a mud floor. He is quoting the seventeenth-century Henry Best. How to lay a mud floor. The earth was to be dug and raked until the moulds were 'indifferent small'. The water was to be brought in 'seas' and 'in great tubs or hogsheads or sleddes'. The earth was then to be watered until it was a 'soft puddle'. It was then allowed to lie a fortnight until the water had settled and the material had begun to grow hard again. Then the floor was to be 'melled' and beaten down with wooden paddles to a smooth finish. The generally used mud floors were porous, and so absorbed 'any wet matter, particularly that of nitrous content; for no-one was fastidious about sanitation ... Mud floors were very dusty and difficult to keep clean. In dry weather they were often strewn with rushes and damp plants. Some of the better-class houses had mud for the floor mixed with a proportion of bullock's blood, fine clay and bone chips, which dried hard and gave it the appearance of black marble when polished ... The use of sand and lime as flooring for cottages was new to most areas until well into the eighteenth century.'

My Flemish bond floors are hard set in their ways. Some are locked together with barely a knife blade between them. Others lie and inch apart in black ditches along which the copper-water has flown in soapy gulleys. Until John Nash came to the house in World War Two the actual stream which had fed Bottengoms ever since it was built ran across the great kitchen, in via the larder, out by the front door, so that one never need to go outside for domestic water. This is where the washing copper and the brewing copper stood, the massive stone sink and the bread oven. So the dips in the brickwork were not only the evidence of the sacred rite of scrubbing. This low room was a delta land through whose crevasses and scrubbed-out dips water of one kind or another poured, trickled, hung around or sped. It was scrubbed with a broom. Countless washdays have left the copper-stand bricks rounded and edgeless. The big stone sink in which children stood to be flannelled with a heavy hand, rinsed and lifted down, does duty in the garden. But the door where the men pulled off their 'loving-land', i.e. soil-clinging boots, still remains its bar or oak, a lump of wood which when slotted through iron bands at bedtime, out-defended any key.

Feet are so delicate. The tiniest bush (prickle) will lame them. With only an oblong of rag rug by the hearth, with boots drying in the corner, with shoes for best, naked or barely covered feet made their way daily over my bricks for ages. The white feet of girls, the brown feet of boys, the crippled feet of the old. The 'dead feet' which Thomas Hardy still saw walking in. No other part of an ancient house has so experienced the bodies of those who lived in it. Foot-worn entrances, hand-worn scrubbings. And three sprawling bedchambers with wide elm-board floors. Coffin wood. Wood which stays dry, even in the grave. And the master-and-his wife room, running down hill, the elm boards patched with blocks where the rats have entered. There for reign after reign the country couples tossed, copulated, slept, talked worried, suffered, died. 'What a lovely guest-room!' the visitors cry. It is the same room and the same bed in which I slept as a boy, feet in the air. In which Paul Nash slept. There was a drawing of his elms. And a heavy little board oil of sheep by John. And a randy tile by the washbasin of 'The Sailor's Return'. And a lamp-blackened ceiling, and rickety 'good' furniture, a full-length swing looking-glass for narcissists and a whiff of historic occupancy.

The hugger-muggerness of life in a farmhouse before there could be such an outlandish thing as a room of one's own required one to see without looking and to hear without listening. And certainly to speak innocently. Single labourers mounted the ladder to the attic, there to freeze or bake. A maid-servant or two would find rest in a screened corner. There was little or no light other than that from the sun, the moon and the stars. The dogs and cats did best before the cinders. And all those white and brown, clean and dirty, perfect and imperfect feet running to and fro over the floors.

It was, without stop
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Here in this house, all the time.