The villagers of
Badsey especially, as well as of other adjoining parishes, were just
beginning to retrieve their position, threatened by the collapse of
corn-growing and consequent unemployment, by the adoption of
market-gardening and fruit-growing. The land, run down and full of
weeds and rubbish, had been cut up into allotments and offered to them
as tenants, their only choice lying between years of hard work in
redeeming its condition or emigration. Many young men chose the
latter, and did well in the States of America; but where there was a
wife and young children that course was scarcely possible, and the man
became an allotment tenant. Passing one of these on a plot full of
"squitch," which he was laboriously breaking up with a fork to expose
it in big clods to a baking sun, I asked if he had taken it. "Well,"
said he, "I don't know whether I've taken _it_ or it's taken _me_!"
These men, by unceasing labour and self-denial, were just beginning to
turn the corner; they had cleaned the land, ameliorated its mechanical
condition by application of soot and by deep digging with their
beloved forks, and, having discovered how wonderfully asparagus
nourished on this deep, rich soil, had planted large areas, as well as
plum-trees and other market-garden crops, and the well-merited return
was coming in increasingly year by year.
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