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Fred Kitchen
Price £40.00

In January 1933 Fred Kitchen, an agricultural labourer, joined the Worker's Educational Association, and so began the process of writing Brother to the Ox, his autobiography first published in 1940. Born in 1891, Fred Kitchen moved to the West Riding as a young boy, and spent an almost lyrically happy childhood amongst the woods and fields of rural Yorkshire. In the book, Kitchen vividly recreates village life - the Christmas parties at the great house, the divisions between 'genteel' Anglicans and 'ranter' Methodists, the respectability of the villagers under the watchful eyes of the trinity of landlord, clergyman and schoolmaster - and goes on to describe the working life of an agricultural labourer with a freshness and sharpness that carries total conviction. The varied and versatile skills of the labourer before modern farming are described in full: sowing, hedging, reaping, ditching, stacking and many others. The hiring fairs, the ploughing competitions, the stories of witches and fairies, the folk songs, the love of animals, are all covered, but the hardness of agricultural life is given its full measure, and there is no romanticization of this rural world before the Second World War. What perhaps is unique is the combination of agricultural labouring work with a full and sensitive awareness of literature:Kitchen's love of Shakespeare, Dickens and the other classics. There is also a moving account of his deeply happy first marriage and the grief resulting from the death of his wife; his eventual acceptance of the philosophical stoicism of Omar Khayyam and the return to happiness with a second marriage and family life. This book is about a man who knew what it was to be 'drunk with the joy of life', and who captured through his writing a traditional way of life destined to disappear in the twentieth century.

From Chapter 4, "The Hireling:

"Every one at all the three farms went to bed at nine-though the other two farms allowed their lads until ten on Saturdays-and though it may seem a ridiculous hour to be going to roost, when a man had to be in the fields from six-thirty in the morning he was ready for bed at night. I enjoyed these musical evenings singing old English songs; but alas for the fly in the ointment, if I offered to oblige with Hearts of Oak, or some well-known school song, the missus' s voice would come from the kitchen door, 'George! George! en yer owt for 'im to do a minute?' and I should be sent to do another odd job.