Michaelmas, by Jean Cattermole
An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.
The tractor came to Hollow Farm in the August of 1948, a grey Ferguson that Geoffrey Rix drove up from the station himself, sitting very upright, with his demob hat still on. Walter Pegg watched it come up the lane from the stable door. Behind him in the dark the two Suffolks, Captain and Duchess, shifted their weight and blew through their noses at the smell of paraffin.
Walter had been horseman at Hollow Farm for thirty-one years, under old Mr Rix and now under his son. He had ploughed the Long Acre every autumn since he was sixteen. He knew which furrows held water and which part of the headland was stony, and he knew the horses the way some men know their own children, by the sound of them in the night.
The tractor ploughed the Long Acre in two days. It would have taken Walter and the horses a fortnight.
Geoffrey came to the cottage at the beginning of September. He stood on the step with his cap in his hands and would not come in, though Walter’s wife asked him twice. He said that the horses would go to the sale at Stowmarket on the twentieth. He said that he would need the cottage at Michaelmas, for the man who was coming to drive the tractor, who had a wife and three young ones. He said that he had spoken to the council, and that there was a chance of a house in the new rows at Needham in the spring.
‘It’s not what Father would have wanted,’ he said. ‘I know that. But Father didn’t have to make it pay.’
He took an envelope from his pocket and held it out. Walter looked at it for a long while and did not take it, and in the end Geoffrey put it on the windowsill, beside the geraniums, and went away down the path without his cap on, holding it in his hand.
On the morning of the sale Walter was up at four. He brushed the horses until they shone like conkers, and he combed out their manes and plaited them with red and yellow braid as he had done for the shows before the war, and he oiled their hooves. Then he put on his good jacket and took both halters in one hand.
Geoffrey was waiting in the yard with the lorry.
‘I’ll run them over, Walter. Save you the walk. It’s nine miles.’
‘They’ll walk,’ Walter said. ‘They’ve walked everywhere else.’
So the lorry went on ahead, empty, and Walter walked behind it with the two horses, one on either side, down the lane between the hedges where the blackberries were coming. Geoffrey slowed at the bottom of the lane and looked back through the cab window, as if he would stop. Then the lorry turned onto the Stowmarket road and was gone, and there was only the sound of the hooves, steady and unhurried, all the way to the town.
“Geoffrey Rix is presented as a heartless man who does not care about Walter.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.