Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Thinking about
Belonging in
Youth Studies
Anita Harris
Hernan Cuervo
Johanna Wyn
Studies in Childhood and Youth
Series Editors
Afua Twum-Danso Imoh
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
Spyros Spyrou
European University Cyprus
Nicosia, Cyprus
Penny Curtis
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
This well-established series embraces global and multi-disciplinary schol-
arship on childhood and youth as social, historical, cultural and material
phenomena. With the rapid expansion of childhood and youth studies in
recent decades, the series encourages diverse and emerging theoretical and
methodological approaches. We welcome proposals which explore the
diversities and complexities of children’s and young people’s lives and
which address gaps in the current literature relating to childhoods and
youth in space, place and time. We are particularly keen to encourage writ-
ing that advances theory or that engages with contemporary global chal-
lenges. Studies in Childhood and Youth will be of interest to students and
scholars in a range of areas, including Childhood Studies, Youth Studies,
Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Politics, Psychology, Education,
Health, Social Work and Social Policy.
Thinking about
Belonging in Youth
Studies
Anita Harris Hernan Cuervo
Deakin University University of Melbourne
Burwood, VIC, Australia Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Johanna Wyn
University of Melbourne
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Acknowledgements
v
About the Book
This book interrogates the ‘turn’ to belonging in youth studies. The con-
cept of belonging has emerged as a recurring theme in the youth studies
literature, offering new alignments across previously divergent approaches.
But its pervasiveness in the field has led to the criticism that ‘belonging’ is
simultaneously ‘everything and nothing’, and requires deeper analysis to
be of enduring value. This book does this work.
The book is organised around the question ‘what does the concept of
belonging do?’. Taking a global perspective, it provides the reader with an
accessible, scholarly account of how youth studies uses this concept.
Chapters address its historical and theoretical underpinnings, and its prev-
alence in youth policy and research, with a focus on transitions, participa-
tion, citizenship, and mobility.
Readers will gain a much-needed perspective on why belonging has
emerged as a key concept to understand young lives today, and its benefits
and shortcomings.
Praise For Thinking About Belonging
In Youth Studies
“This book is a game changer for youth studies. Offering a new and long
overdue take on the turn to belonging in youth policy and research, it
interrogates ideas about young people and relationality and how these are
deployed particularly in settler-colonial nations. It opens up exciting new
spaces for understanding how young people consider and enact connect-
edness in difficult times. This is an important must-read analysis from a
team of leading youth studies scholars.”
—Joanna Kidman, Professor of Māori Education,
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
2 Historical Underpinnings 17
3 Conceptual Threads 45
4 Policy Frames 71
6 Citizenship131
7 Mobilities169
Index233
xi
About the Authors
xiii
CHAPTER 1
social space. These forces are often keenly felt by young people, not just
because they are interwoven with transitions in the life course but also
because young people are intimately connected to both the challenges and
opportunities of social, economic, technological and environmental change.
belonging perspective. Work by Wyn and Woodman has centred the idea of
youth as belonging to a social generation (Woodman & Wyn, 2015). More
recently, the question of how young people are positioned in society in
generational belonging terms has been taken up from the perspective of
political economy. For example, Bessant et al. (2017) provide a provocative
analysis of the situation for the current generation of young people, argu-
ing that it is time for a new ‘intergenerational contract’ to be built – one
that recognises that under post-neoliberalism, the relationship between
work and resources is being transformed. This approach directly confronts
the question of where and how young people belong in new times. Similarly,
Furlong et al. (2018) in Young people in the Labour Market: Past and Present
argue that long-term structural change to the labour market requires new,
more flexible policy responses, as the ‘new normal’ for young people
becomes liminal employment. These books engage with the question of
youth belonging from the perspective of economic security.
In some ways, our book is a response to this growing literature that
uses the concept of belonging to explore the situation and lives of young
people today. The framework of belonging appears to address many of the
current issues confronting both youth and youth studies in an intercon-
nected fashion, sometimes promising to cut across limiting empirical and
conceptual foci, and providing a core organising concept for engaging
with complex and interrelated aspects of young people’s lives today.
Indeed, in our own individual and collaborative work (Cuervo & Wyn,
2012, 2017; Cuervo et al., 2015; Harris, 2016; Raffaetà et al., 2016;
Wyn, 2013, 2015) we have found ourselves drawn to this idea, utilising it
as a way into empirical investigation as well as unpacking it as a metaphor.
The question ‘where and how do young people belong?’ certainly feels
like an intellectually expansive and politically compelling starting point for
youth studies today. ‘Belonging’ has helped to overcome some of the
more rigid and categorical approaches to youth (such as ‘transitions’ or
‘self-concept’) and opened onto productive ways of thinking about the
relational dimensions of youth experience in complex times, and young
people’s connections to place, people, material spaces and objects.
And yet we have been aware of some of its limitations. We have found
ourselves wondering about the easy take up of this term, and especially a
tendency for it to be used uncritically or rather normatively; for it to be
treated as a self-evident idea (and a good state to be in) rather than deeply
theorised. The more belonging pops up, the less it seems to be scrutinised.
Indeed, one of our avenues of inquiry is the possibly universalising
1 THE QUESTION OF BELONGING IN YOUTH STUDIES 7
what the concept of belonging does in and for youth studies. We suggest
that such an analysis of belonging must precede any work to mobilise a
critical framework of relationality, which may be its greatest potentiality.
References
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16 A. HARRIS ET AL.
Historical Underpinnings
Introduction
Although the term belonging has only recently come into regular usage in
youth studies, the question of young people’s relationships to and place in
cultural, political, economic, social and physical space is a central theme in
youth studies. Yet, despite being so central to the analysis of young peo-
ple’s lives, the concept of belonging has tended to be poorly defined.
Exploring the work that concepts of belonging do in youth studies invites
us to question how societies and institutions choose to manage their
changing relationships with youth. Its use in contemporary youth studies
compels us to provide greater conceptual clarity about how the concept of
belonging is deployed, how it shapes wider social recognition of young
people, and to understand in more depth what these conceptual approaches
mean and do for analysis. Tracing the genealogy of belonging in youth
studies sets the backdrop for this book.
Our interest in exploring the genealogy of youth studies through the
lens of belonging reflects a broader contemporary movement in the field
to seek ways to go beyond the divisions and binaries that have tended to
dominate youth research over the last 20 years or so (France, 2016), in
order to realise the potential for youth research to be a ‘powerful vehicle
from which we can explore big issues with implications for social science
as a whole’ (Furlong 2015, p. 18). The metaphor of belonging is of
of these dynamics, creating new anxieties about and risks for young people
in ways that are yet to unfold. This chapter draws on these and many other
works to add to the endeavour of understanding of young people’s rela-
tionship with social change and social processes, through the lens of
belonging across time.
Many of the ‘threads’ identified in this chapter are developed further in
the chapters that follow, shifting from the more historical focus of this
chapter to an analysis of contemporary approaches and uses of the concept
of belonging. This includes an analysis of how belonging is explored and
debated through the frameworks of transitions and participation, policy,
citizenship, place-making and mobilities.
She speaks to these and other emerging anxieties about social change
and generational conflict, to parents who have survived the war and strug-
gle to come to terms with a situation where ‘old beliefs, conventional
manners and morals, are being weighed in the balance and viewed from
new angles’ and to a new generation who ‘are unable perhaps to accept
the beliefs and ideals of the generations before them, but they are building
2 HISTORICAL UNDERPINNINGS 21
the complex social and community surround of the young boys he studied.
He maintained that these young men were enmeshed in what he called the
“situation complex,” a web of influences that could not be understood in
isolation from, but only in relation to, each other. One could not under-
stand schools, for example, without understanding how they competed with
the media, families, church, and gangs for boys’ affections and imaginative
energies. Thrasher’s study was highly contextual and relational, foreground-
ing the agency of young people in constructing their selves and social rela-
tions. (Dimitriadis, 2006, p. 338)
new forms of older social divisions based on class, gender and race. For
example, in 1941–1942 Hollingshead (1949) undertook a community
study of the relationship between the social organisation of a small town
(Elmtown) in the Middle Western Corn Belt of the USA, and the lives of
735 school-aged young people. Framed as a sociological study of adoles-
cence, the book is an account of how ‘the social system’ of a town ‘orga-
nizes and controls the social behaviour of high-school-aged adolescents’
(Hollingshead, 1949, p. 10). This approach was explicitly in juxtaposition
to the domination of youth research by other disciplines, comment-
ing that:
In the UK, these changes were also fuelled by concern about the emer-
gence of unwelcome social changes in post-war Britain. For example, Reed
(1950) studied the attitudes and leisure habits of 80,000 Birmingham
youth aged 14–20. This study explicitly references the wartime dislocation
of family life and the emergence of universal state education, both of
which were seen to be a threat to traditional ideas about how young peo-
ple relate to society. Reed, who was a Methodist minister, was especially
concerned about the potential for state-based education to erode religious
beliefs and responsibilities amongst the new generation, foreshadowing
the sense of moral panic that was later identified (Cohen, 1955). Reed
argued that whilst it was:
quite erroneous to suppose that there are large numbers of unattached ado-
lescents roaming the streets or going to the cinema every evening or spend-
ing their leisure in vicious or antisocial ways … what one does feel about the
lives of many of these young people, … is that they are very barren and
restricted. (Reed, 1950, p. 131)
In a tone that foreshadows the interest in insecurity and risk that has
dominated youth studies since the early 1980s the authors refer to the
1950s as ‘a quicksilver age’ in which ‘it is not possible to point, with secu-
rity, the direction in which the changes are trending except to say that they
are productive of further change’ (Connell et al., 1957, p. 207). Focusing
on implications for education, Connell et al. argued that one of the most
‘urgent’ developmental tasks of young people was ‘learning to deal with
insecurity’ (1957, p. 207). This book makes a significant shift from earlier
studies of young people that saw school as a threat to stability, concluding
instead that schools have the answer. Connell et al. saw schools as provid-
ing youth with the skills of ‘cultural evaluation’ and judgement, which
would ‘enable him (sic) to add his mite to the clarification of an urban
culture’ that is ‘far from clear’ (Connell et al., 1957, p. 210). Growing up
in an Australian City (Connell et al., 1957) carves out a distinctive
approach to the question of how young people belong. This study sees
youth as the bearers of a post-colonial future, and young people as making
active choices that will shape that future. Young people, in this study,
belong in the very centre of the colony’s development, guided by a critical
educational program that addresses their developmental needs and those
of the emerging nation.
Yet, there is also a profound statement of ‘unbelonging’ in this
approach, which invites further attention. Young Indigenous Australians
are, quite simply, an absence. Their absence is consistent with the prevail-
ing ideas of the time, which did not recognise Indigenous people as first
nations or citizens, nor account for the relationship between Indigenous
Australians and ‘country’ – the land, the waters and all living creatures that
centrally constitute the spirituality and sovereignty of Indigenous
Australians. Writing about Indigenous Australians from the 1920s onwards
was informed by the idea that Indigenous Australians were inherently
more primitive than White Australians (Elkin, 1929). The aim of academic
writing, drawing on the emerging disciplines of social anthropology and
the eugenics movement, was almost unanimous in positioning the future
for Australia’s Indigenous people as one of assimilation or annihilation. It
is hard to find any writing specifically about young Indigenous people in
the period from the 1920s to the 1960s – there is no recognition of their
past, and rather than being positioned as the hope for the future, they are
positioned as problematic to the future (a position that continues to frame
the way that Indigenous youth are seen, as we discuss in Chap. 4 (Policy
Frames). Australian cultural anthropologist Elkin (1937) argued that ‘if
Aborigines were to attain a fuller participation in the Australian nation’,
26 A. HARRIS ET AL.
they had to be assisted over ‘the difficult times of transition from the old
stone-age to that higher stage of culture to which we desire to lead them’
(Elkin, 1937, as cited in McGregor, 1993, p. 96). Thus, in stark contrast
to the writings of authors like Reed and Chesters, who saw the increasing
institutionalisation of young people in education as constituting a possible
threat to young people’s family and spiritual connections, the removal of
Australia’s Indigenous young people from families and their compulsory
participation in educational institutions from 1910 onwards, became
enshrined in policies that explicitly sought to break young Indigenous
people’s connection to their families, to country and to their spiritual
beliefs (Brown, 2018). As Moreton-Robinson (2003, p. 30) explains, the
situation of young Indigenous peoples:
working-class young men to absorb the ideals and practices of the new
American middle class. Cohen argued that these deviant young men were
a product of the disruption of traditional socialisation processes caused by
a range of changes, including the reduction of unskilled jobs and the rise
of mass secondary education (Cohen & Short, 1958). Like Connell et al.
(1957), Cohen’s work also focused on urban areas as the fulcrum of social
change, arguing that delinquent subcultures occurred in the cities where
an increasingly dispossessed working-class struggled to belong. These
ideas were developed further by Coleman (1961) who focused specifically
on the ways in which the new mass education sector of secondary school
in the US in the 1950s brought with it an era of age-based affiliations,
reflected in ‘teen’ fashion and new leisure styles, threatening traditional
ways. Coleman’s study highlighted the potential threat of this new situa-
tion where, he argued, young people were cut off from adult society
through their mass participation in education. Coleman’s focus on the
risks of education was developed further by Musgrove (1964) who
explored the situation for Australian youth, arguing that mass secondary
education was creating a ‘new class’ based on age.
The sense of unease about youth in this period was to some extent fos-
tered by the field of developmental psychology. This approach assumed
that age meant everything. Drawing on the ideas of G. Stanley Hall
(1904), the concept of stages of youthful development was popularised by
Piaget (1954) and then Erikson (1965). These authors proposed that the
biological processes of development dominated the period of youth
(termed ‘adolescence’ to give prominence to the biological process of
maturation) focussing on the risks of failure to complete all the develop-
mental tasks of successful maturation into adults. This developmental
focus reinforced the idea that youth was an inherently risky stage of life. It
proposed the existence of distinct and universal developmental stages that,
if not achieved, would compromise healthy, mature adulthood, and it saw
youth as being more pre-disposed than any other age group to taking
risks. Risk-taking, from this perspective, is essential because of an inherent
need to ‘try on’ different identities before ‘settling down’ but at the same
time, this period of experimentation has the potential to go wrong and
jeopardise healthy development. The focus on universal normative pro-
cesses of development and the non-normative (or deviant) behaviour that
fails to follow normative patterns, supported a view of youth as inherently
risky and in need of professional intervention. The traces of these ideas are
clear in much youth research of the 1950s and 1960s. For example,
28 A. HARRIS ET AL.
Post-Industrial Youth
The 1960s and 1970s are often regarded as the period which defined the
parallel tracks of youth studies: one focusing on youthful cultural identifi-
cations and social change (youth sub-cultures) and the other focusing on
transformations from education to work (transitions) (Woodman &
Bennett, 2015). However, a closer look at the work being undertaken in
the 1960s and 1970s shows that many youth researchers attempted to
hold the strands of transition and culture together in order to understand
how young people belonged in a context of societal transformations that
impacted most directly on young people.
The signs of a collapse in the youth labour market were emerging by
the early 1970s, resulting from the shift from industry-based economies to
post-industrial economies (often touted as ‘knowledge’ or ‘service’ econo-
mies). These changes had a significant impact on the life choices of young
men from working class families in particular, who would traditionally
have sought full-time work after completing a minimum of secondary
education, but whose options were becoming foreclosed. The 1960s and
1970s were also a period of change for women, whose participation in the
labour market increased significantly during this time. In the US for exam-
ple, the labour market participation for married women increased from
25% to 46% between 1950 and 1970, and this figure is repeated in most
30 A. HARRIS ET AL.
Compulsory school attendance, in effect, has become less an issue in the face
of the substantial incentive, ‘the promise’, for those continuing their educa-
tion. School ‘stayers’ who are ready to tolerate the demands of continued and
often competitive schooling, who can accept economic dependency, social
subordination and sexual sublimation are persuaded it will more than ‘pay
off’ in the future to do so. Postponed satisfactions and suspended rights and
status are temporary losses more than compensated for by personal success,
social standing, income, power and, some would venture, happiness prized in
the dominant success-oriented type of culture. (Connell et al., 1975, pp. 3–4)
how youth was being shaped by the changing relationship between educa-
tion and work, contributing to a renewed focus on this dynamic to the
exclusion of others.
Language: English
Credits: Al Haines
By
Eden Phillpotts
Author of "Miser's Money," etc.
1920
London : William Heinemann
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE HILLTOP
II. FALCON FARM
III. SUPPER
IV. AT BUCKLAND-IN-THE-MOOR
V. THE ACCIDENT
VI. ON HAZEL TOR
VII. AT GREEN HAYES
VIII. THE OLD FOX-HUNTER
IX. A HOLIDAY FOR SUSAN
X. TALKING WITH DINAH
XI. NEW BRIDGE
XII. AFTERWARDS
XIII. JOE ON ECONOMICS
XIV. THE FACE ON THE ROCK
XV. BEN BAMSEY'S DOUBTS
XVI. SUNDAY
XVII. DINAH
XVIII. MAYNARD
XIX. LIGHT OF AUTUMN
XX. THE HUNTER'S MOON
XXI. FUNERAL
XXII. AT WATERSMEET
XXIII. IN A SICK-ROOM
XXIV. "THE REST IS EASY"
XXV. JOHN AND JOE
XXVI. MR. PALK SEEKS ADVICE
XXVII. DISCOVERY
XXVIII. THE LAW
XXIX. JOE TAKES IT ILL
XXX. THE NEST
XXXI. JOE'S SUNDAY
XXXII. JANE AND JERRY
XXXIII. JOE HEARS THE SECRET
XXXIV. AN OFFER
XXXV. FOR RIGHT AND JUSTICE
XXXVI. THE WEDDING DAY
XXXVII. SHEPHERD'S CROSS
XXXVIII. RETURN FROM THE HONEYMOON
CHAPTER I
THE HILLTOP
In this hour, after noon on a day of mid September, the light was
changing, not gradually at the sun's proper declension, but under the forces
of a south-west wind bringing up vapour at twenty miles an hour from the
distant sea.
From the rounded and weathered masses of the Beacon, the hill sloped
abruptly and a receding foreground of dying fern and grey, granite boulders
broke on a gap of such extent that earth, reappearing far below, was already
washed by the milky azure of the air, through which it glimmered and
receded and presently again rose to lofty lands beyond. The ground plan
was a mighty cup, over which the valley undulated, rising here to knap and
knoll, falling there into coombs and plains, sinking to its lowest depths
immediately beneath the view point, where Dart wound about lesser hills,
not small in themselves, yet dwarfed by the greatness of the expanse and
the loftiness of the horizon's brim. Upon that distant and irregular line, now
melting into the thick air, border heights and saliencies sank and rose,
repeating on a vaster scale the anatomy of the river basin. They lifted
through the hazes until they faded upon the sight into the gathering clouds,
that loomed still full of light, above their grey confines. The sea was long
since hidden.
The woods of Buckland bear noble timber and each tree in many a glen
is a giant, thrusting upward from vast bole to mossy branch, until its high
top ascends among its neighbours to sunlight and storm. They are worthy of
the hills that harbour them, and in their combined myriads affect the
operations of the air, draw the rain clouds for their own sustenance and help
to create the humidity that keeps Dart Vale so dewy and so green. Down
and down they roll endlessly, sinking away into the likeness of a clinging
moss; for seen afar, they look no more upon this great pattern of rising and
falling earth, than a close integument. Their size is lost against the greater
size of the undulations they clothe; they shrink to a close pelt for the land—
no heavier than the leagues of the eagle fern, or the autumnal cloth of
purple and gold flung upon the hills above them.
To-day the highest lights were in the depths, where Dart flashed at a
fall, or shone along some placid reach. She was but a streak of polished
silver seen from aloft, and her manifold beauties hidden; while other remote
spots and sparks of light that held the eye conveyed no detail either. They
meant a mansion, or the white or rosy wash on cottage faces. A grey
smudge, sunk in the green to westward, was a village; a white lozenge in
the woods beneath, the roof of a moorland church. Here and there blue
feathers of wood smoke melted upward into the oncoming clouds; and
thinly, through vapours beyond, like a tangle of thread, there twined high
roads, ascending from invisible bridges and hamlets to the hills.
And then, little by little, detail faded and the shadows of the clouds
grew denser, the body of the clouds extended. Still they were edged with
light, but the light died as they thickened and lumbered forward, spreading
their pinions over the Vale. The air gradually grew opaque, and ridge after
ridge, height after height, disappeared in it. They were not blotted out, but
washed away, until the fingers of the rain felt dumbly along the bosom of
Buckland Beacon, dimmed the heath and furze to greyness, curled over the
uplifted boulder, found and slaked the least thirsty wafer of gold or ebony
lichen that clung thereto.
A young man, who had been standing motionless upon the Beacon, felt
the cool brush of the rain upon his face and woke from his reverie. He was
of a recipient, intelligent aspect, and appeared to admire the great spectacle
spread before him; but whether, behind the thing seen, any deeper emotion
existed for him; whether to the outward and visible sign there responded
any inward and spiritual grace, was a question not to be answered
immediately. He prepared to descend, where a building stood upon the hill
below him half a mile distant. There he was expected, but as yet knew it
not.
CHAPTER II
FALCON FARM
Beneath the Beacon, across the great slope that fell from its summit to
the river valley, a road ran into the woods that hid Buckland village, and
upon the right hand of this highway, perched among open fields, that
quilted the southern slope of the heights, there stood a stone house. Here
was Falcon Farm, and over it the hawks that had given it name would often
poise and soar and utter their complaining cries. The cluster of buildings
perched on the hillside consisted of a slate-roofed dwelling house, with
cartsheds, a cowhouse, and stable and a fine barn assembled round the farm
yard. About them stretched square fields, off some of which a harvest of
oats had just been shorn; while others were grass green with the sprawling
foliage of turnip. Beneath, between the farmhouse and the wooded road,
extended meadows into which fern and heath were intruding ominously. A
little wedge of kitchen garden was scooped out of the hill beside the yard
and a dry-built wall fell from the shoulder of the Beacon above, broke at
Falcon Farm, and with diverging arms separated its field and fallow from
the surrounding wild.
The door of the dwelling faced west, and here stood a man talking to a
woman.
"A day of great events," said the farmer. "My two new hands both
coming and, as my manner is, I hope the best, but fear the worst."
"Yes. But that means more than the words on a little place like this, as I
made clear. In fact, they've got to do pretty much everything—with such
help as I can give and Neddy Tutt."
"Hope they'll be all right. But they mustn't count on a poor, weak, old
man like you, of course."
Mr. Stockman looked into Melinda's face. She was a chubby, red-haired
woman built on massive lines with a bosom that threatened to burst its
lavender print, and a broad, beamy body beneath. She had a pair of pale
blue eyes and a finely modelled mouth, not devoid of character. Her teeth
were neglected. She wore a white sunbonnet, which threw a cool shadow
over her face, and carried a basket, now full of small carrots and large
lettuces.
"You poke your fun at me, forgetting I've done ten men's work in my
time and must slack off," he said. "Because, thanks to plain living and
moderation in all things, and the widowed state with all its restfulness, I
don't look my age, that's not to say I don't feel it, I can assure you. There's
certain rights I owe to myself—the only person as ever I did owe anything
to in my life—and even if I was fool enough to want to make a martyr of
myself, which I'm not—even so Soosie-Toosie would never let me."
"My daughter knows where the shoe pinches; and that's in my breathing
parts. Often I'll stand to work like a young man, knowing all the time I shall
have to pay for it with a long rest after."
"Poor chap!"
"You be among the unbelievers I see—that's your father's bad work. But
since he don't believe in nothing, I can't hope he'll ever believe in me."
"But the new men. Tell me about them. What are they like?"
"Ah, you females! It's always the outside of a man as interests you. For
my part it was what their papers and characters were like that I had to think
about; and even so I've took one largely on trust."
"I like to trust. I like to do unto others as they should do unto me. But
it's a disappointing rule of life. To be above the staple of your fellow
creatures is to get a lot of shocks, Melinda; but you can only set a good
example; you can't make people follow it. One man I have seen, t'other I
have not. Thomas Palk, the horseman—so to call him—is in sight of
middle-age and a towser for work. He's leaving Haccombe, down Newton
Abbot way, because his master's son is taking up his job. A very good man
by all accounts, and he understands the position and knows what lies before
him. A faithful-looking man and I hope he'll prove so. Plain as a bit of
moor-stone—in fact a mighty ugly man; but an honest face if I know
anything."
"Father says nobody knows better than you what work means; but
somebody else has always got to do it."
"A wonderful man your father; yet I'm very much afraid he'll go to hell
when the end comes, Melinda."
"He's not."
The dogs, apparently understanding, sat round with their eye on Joseph.
"If your godless parent was to see these poor creatures to work, I can
tell you what he'd say, Melinda. He'd say thicky spaniel was like me—
knows her job very well indeed and prefers to see the younger dogs doing
it. And why not?"
"No use growing old if you don't grow artful," admitted Melinda.
"Of course it ban't—here's the girl. What's the matter now, Soosie? The
rabbits? I be just going after 'em."
But Miss Stockman, Joseph's only child, had not come about the rabbits.
She was a woman resembling her father in no respect. Her hair was black,
lustreless and rough, her brown face disfigured by a "port wine" stain that
descended from her forehead to her cheek. Her expression was anxious and
careworn, and though large-boned and powerfully made, she was thin. She
had brown, dog-like eyes, a mouth with sad lips and a pleading voice,
which seemed to have the same querulous note as the hawks that so often
hung in air above her home.
"Mr. Maynard's box have come, father," she said. "Be he to live in the
house, or to go in the tallet over the stables? Both rooms are sweet and
ready for 'em."
"The horseman goes over the stables, as being the right and proper place
for him," said Mr. Stockman. "And if there was a dwelling room over the
cows, the cowman would go there. But there is not, so he'll come in the
house."
"Right then," answered his daughter. "Mr. Maynard comes in the house;
Mr. Palk goes over the hosses."
"And you tell your father that so soon as the woodcock be back—not
long now—he'll have the first. I don't bear no malice."
"We all know that. And when you shoot it, you come in and have a tell
with father. You do him good."
She descended down the farm road to the highway beneath, and Joseph,
getting his gun, went upwards with his rejoicing dogs into the fern brakes
on the side of the Beacon.
Here, in the pursuit of the only exercise he really loved, Joe Stockman
forgot his alleged years. He was a wonderfully steady shot, though it suited
him to pretend that failing sight interfered very seriously with his sport; but
he excelled still in the difficult business of snapping rabbits in fern. Thus
engaged, with his dogs to help him, he became oblivious of weather and it
was not until the sight of an approaching stranger arrested him that he grew
conscious of the rain. Then he turned up his collar over his blue woollen
shirt and swore.
The man who had recently surveyed Dart Vale from the summit of the
rocks above, was now descending, and seeing the farmer, turned his steps
towards him. He was a slight-built but well-knit youth of seven or eight and
twenty. He stood an inch under six feet and was somewhat refined in
appearance. His face was resolute and cleanly turned, his skin clear and of a
natural olive, that his open-air life had tanned. He wore a small, black
moustache over a stern mouth, and his eyes were very dark brown and of a
restless and inquiring expression. He wore rough, old tweeds, a little darned
at the seat, and on his left arm over the elbow was a mourning band. His
legs were cased in tawny gaiters; he had a grey cap on his black hair and in
his hands he carried an ash sapling with which, unconsciously from habit,
he smote his leg as he walked.
"Very right indeed," answered Mr. Stockman. "In fact, so right that it's
under your nose. There's Falcon Farm, and I'm the farmer, and I guess
you're Lawrence Maynard, due to-day."
The other smiled and his habitual solemnity lifted off his face.
"I dare say it would. There's nothing like a hilly country for tightening
the muscles. The Shire hosses find that out when they come here. Yes, that's
Falcon Farm. And there's the cows—all red Devons."
The newcomer looked down upon a little cluster of kine grazing in a
meadow.
"A beautiful spot sure enough. And snug by the look of it."
"Nothing to grumble at for high land. But it calls for work. I've been
here five and twenty year and made it what it is; but I'm old for my age,
along of hard labour in all weathers, and can't do all I would no more.
However, we'll tell about it later when my other new man, Thomas Palk,
arrives. Horseman, he is; but, as I explained, you and him are going to be
my right and left hand now, and I can see you're the quick sort that will
justify yourself from the first."
"Heave up them rabbits then, and we'll go down along. I can stop a bird
or beast still, though getting cruel dim in the eye."
Maynard picked up three heavy rabbits and they went down the hill
together.
"We're a small party," explained Joe, "but very friendly, easy people—
too busy to waste time on differences. And you and Palk will find
yourselves very comfortable I hope. There's only me and my daughter, Miss
Stockman, who rules us men, and a young boy, Neddy Tutt, whose making
up into a useful hand. At hay harvest and corn harvest I hire. We've just got
home our oats. For the roots, we can pull them ourselves. Of the men who
have left me, one went for faults, and we can let the past bury the past;
t'other found the winter a thought too hard up here and have gone down to
the in-country. He's wrong, but that's his business."
The newcomer felt favourably impressed, for Mr. Stockman had great
art to win strangers. He promised to be a kindly and easy man, as he
declared himself to be.
Lawrence patted the dogs, who sniffed round him with offers of
friendship, and presently all returned together.
CHAPTER III
SUPPER
"I must go and change my coat," said the farmer as they entered the
house place. "There was a time when I laughed at a wet jacket, same, no
doubt, as you do; but that time's past. Here's my daughter. She'll show you
your room."
Susan shook hands and her hurried, fitful smile hovered upon the new
arrival.
"Your box be come and I'll give you a hand up," she said. "Your room's
in the house at the end of the passage-way facing east. A very comfortable
room I hope you'll find."
"Thank you, miss. But I'll fetch up the box if you'll show the way."
During the afternoon Mr. Palk did arrive. He drove up from Ashburton
in a trap hired at an inn and brought his luggage with him. He proved a
broad and powerful man of fifty, iron grey, close bearded and close
cropped. His head was set on a massive neck that lifted above heavy
shoulders. His features were huddled together. His nose turned up and
revealed deep nostrils; his mouth was large and shapeless; his eyes were
steadfast. He proved a man with great powers of concentration. Thus his
modest intelligence took him farther than many quicker wits lacking that
gift. He did not see much beyond his immediate vision, but could be clear-
sighted enough at close range. He had no humour and received impressions
slowly, as a child; but grasped them as a child. A light touch was thrown
away on Mr. Palk, as his new master soon found. Nod or wink were alike
futile as means of suggestion: it was necessary to speak plainly that he
might grasp a point. But, once grasped, the matter might safely be left. He
never forgot.
At tea that night Joe Stockman expatiated on the situation and his new
men listened, while the lad, Neddy Tutt, a big, fair youth, intently regarded
them and endeavoured to judge their probable attitude to himself. He was
inclined to like both, but doubted not they were on their best behaviour at
present and might develop character averse from his interests.
"They did; and I'm often shocked in my observing way to see farmers
that don't appear to think so. We keep a generous table here and a good
cook likewise, for what my daughter don't know about a man's likes and
dislikes in the matter of food ain't worth knowing. As to hours, what I say is
that in private service, for that is how you must look at yourselves with me,
hours are beside the question. Here's the work and the work must be done;
and some days it's done inside seven hours I shouldn't wonder, and some
days it's not done inside eight. But only the small mind snaps and snarls for
a regulation hour, and it is one of the most mean things to a man like me,
who never thought of hours but only the work, that poor spirits here and
there be jealous of the clock and down tools just because of the time of day.
For look at it. We ain't all built on the same pattern, and one man can do his
sort of work an hour a day quicker than another, whether it is ploughing, or
harvesting or what not; and the other man can do something else an hour a
day quicker than he can. So I'm for no silly rules, but just give and take to
get the work done."
"A very self-respecting sort of way, and much what I'm used to," said
Maynard.
"Same with liquor," continued Joe. "On the subject of liquor, I take a
man as I find him. I drink my beer and take my nightcap also, and there's
beer and cider going; and if in drouthy weather a man says, 'I want another
half pint,' the barrel's there. I'm like that. I like to feel the respect for my
people that they always get to feel for me. But spirits, no. I might, or I
might not of an evening say to you, 'Have a spot from my bottle, Palk'; but
there wouldn't be no rule."
"I'm teetotal myself," said Maynard, "but very fond of cold tea in
working hours."
"Good. You'll never have less cold tea than you want, be sure."
"I be a thirsty man," confessed the elder. "Beer's my standby and I'm
glad you grant it; but I only drink when I'm thirsty, though that's often,
owing to a great freedom of perspiration. But no man ever saw me bosky-
eyed, and none ever will."
"All to the good, Palk. So there it stands. And one more thing: till you
know the ropes and my manners and customs, always come to me when in
doubt. Your way may be a good way, but where there's two ways, I like
mine, unless you can prove yours better. That's reasonable—eh?"
"The horses are a middling lot and can be trusted to do their work. I'm
buying another at the Ashburton Fair presently. My sheep—Devon long