Sussex, All too Sussex

Green Apple Harvest — By Sheila Kaye-Smith

‘Green Apple Harvest’ is another of those Sussex-grown novels for which Miss Kaye-Smith has gained a page 250 reputation. Its headquarters are a Sussex farmhouse; it wanders through Sussex lanes, fields, meadows, fairs; plays in and out of a Sussex public-house with Sussex farmers as broad as they are long for company; and notes the fact how in Sussex Summer follows Spring, Autumn comes after Summer, and lean old Winter with his beard of ice brings up the rear. As for the manner of speech in Sussex, it is here so faithfully recorded that words with double dots, double vowels, buzzing, humming words, words with their tails cut off, lean words grown fat and stodgy words swelled into dumplings lie so thick upon the page that the reader needs a stout pair of eyes to carry him through.

The name of the farmhouse is Bodingmares. It is the home of the Fuller family—Faather and his second wife Elizabeth; Mary and Jim, two children of the first marriage, and Robert and Clem, two half-grown sons of the second. Mus' Fuller is a grim ancient with ‘a mouth stretched into a line which might have been a smile if it had not been so thin and tragic.’ He worships at the Methodist Chapel.

‘Then you mean to tell me as you're praaperly saved?’

Bob wriggled in his chair.

‘I dunno.’

‘Wot d'you mean—You dunno as you're saved? I tell you as there aun't never no mistake about that. As the lightning shineth from one part of heaven to another…. Wot did you stand up for if you didn't know as you were saved?’

Robert filled his mouth quite full of pudding, and was silent.

But Death and Miss Kaye-Smith remove him at a rattling pace on page 37. Thus his epitaph:

The years of his health had been spent in brooding on heavenly things, but from the moment his last illness page 251 began his mind seemed to concentrate on the small things of the sick-bed. His fight for life was entirely a matter of dose and diet, and his final surrender was not to the Everlasting Arms, but to his own fatigue.

Now for Elizabeth. She is something weak, soft, a creature of physical charms. … It was (most surprisingly) ‘her hair flying dustily golden like pollened anthers’ that had snared old Mus' Fuller. Within six months of his death she is married to Wheelgate, the postman, who takes her to Eastbourne for their honeymoon, thereby proving himself a man of more substance than Jim had supposed him to be, and afterwards to a home of their own, where she has bright chintzes and brasses, and spends the rest of her life cutting out youthful blouses. And exit Elizabeth.

Mary and Jim may be dismissed, one as a spiteful voice, the other as a drawl. There remain Robert and Clem. Clem, the meek plodder, has black hair and yellow eyes. Otherwise his face is ‘just the face of a common Sussex lad, with wide mouth and short nose, and a skin of Saxon fairness under the summer tan.’ But Robert. It is he who gives the book its name.

‘Sims to me as Bob's life lik a green apple tree—he's picked his fruit lik other men, but it's bin hard and sour instead of sweet. Love and religion—they're both sweet things, folks say, but with Bob they've bin as the hard green apples.’

So at long last we come to the hero. Rise up, rise up, young man! It is for you that Bodingmares, that shadowy farmhouse, and the shadowy family have been called into existence. Stand forth, your feet rooted in the dark soil of Sussex, your arms green branches, heavy honey-sweet blossom pushing through your breast. If this is the story of your lusty youth, your broken prime, your bitter harvest, let us, in Heaven's name, have the truth…. But the florid young man in check breeches page 252 and gaiters escapes Miss Kaye-Smith's pen more effectually than all the rest. Violence does not make a man, yet it is the only attribute that the author grants him freely. We are told how at chapel a voice cried to him to stand up and testify, and because that voice made him feel a fool he determines to do all those things ‘as He doan't hold with’ to serve God out. So he goes after the gypsy girl Hannah —the old, old gypsy girl with her shawl and her feathery hat and her wild ways—and drinks and bets. But it is all in vain. God will not let him go and at the end Bob dies for His sake. … ‘I've got a feeling that if I go to the Lord God I'll only be going into the middle of all that's alive. If I'm wud him I can't never lose the month of May.’

‘Green Apple Harvest’ is an example of what a country novel should not be. It is a novel divided against itself, written with two hands—one is the country hand, scoring the dialect, and the other is the town hand, hovering over the wild flowers and pointing out the moon like the ‘blown petal’ of a cherry tree. If the novel were ever alive it would be pulled to death between them.