‘Between Two Civilizations’ 37
from; but he is immediately obliged to concede that ‘it is impossible to give an
idea’ in detail of ‘the intimacy of this knowledge’.^50 However, a more immediate
sense of this elusive detail emerges in his reconstruction of Bettesworth’s voice as
he talks aloud, less to himself than to the turfs he is laying and the tools he is using :
‘Hullo there!’ exclaimed the old man, ‘what be you up to? Anybody’d think you was
alive’. Th en, to make room for a third turf, two already laid had to be squeezed closer.
‘You two git up more together! Th ere, my man; that’s your place. Th ey two wanted
to crowd you out o’bed’. Th e adjustment, alas, proved not to his mind, and he spoke
dubiously, ‘’T en’t a fi t, now. ’Tis more like a perilatic stroke than a fi t ... However, if
I pays ’em with the spade ...Th ere, my lads, I’ll give you socks’.^51Although Sturt remained dissatisfi ed with his eff orts to capture Bettesworth’s
voice and was well aware of the distortions arising from his own inevitable role
as intermediary, arranger and editor, however much he might try to subdue it, in
a passage like this his interventions are minimal and he adds no interpretation.
Instead, the reader has the experience of visualizing the man’s work and of hearing
him talk, sounding more as if he was humouring a small child he was dressing than
repairing a lawn; and this in turn is highly suggestive of the quasi-human relation-
ship between Bettesworth, the ground he is working and the tool he is using.
Th e particular eff ectiveness of that presentational strateg y may be contrasted
with the commentary Sturt gives when Bettesworth explains the technical fea-
tures of a handmade ‘polling beck’ (a digging fork) which had come through
several generations of his wife’s family. For the writer, the tool is a kind of ‘objec-
tive co-relative’ giving him imaginative entry into the history of successive
generations’ relationship to the land, and a vicarious sense of involvement in it:
Th rough a hundred seasons men’s faces had bent over it and felt the heat of the sun
refl ecting up from off the potatoes, as the tines of the beck brightened in the hot soil.
And what sweat and sunburn, yet what delight in the crops, had gone to the polishing
of the handle! A stout ash shaft , cut in some coppice years ago, and but rudely trimmed,
it now shone with the wear of men’s hands; and to balance it as I did, warm and moist
from Bettesworth’s grasp, was to get the thrill of a new meaning from the aft ernoon.^52Th is highly selective construction of the polling beck’s history valorizes physical
labour and the fruits of the earth brought up by the tool without consideration
of the hardship and human cost of such work, especially on days when the sun
was not shining. Ironically, too, it is work that Sturt himself, who was a chronic
asthmatic, would probably have found impossible. It is also notable that while
Bettesworth is interested in explaining certain ‘particularities’ of the polling
beck, the writer excludes these as ‘hardly to be described here’ in order to privi-
lege his own refl ection, which is at odds with his declared aim of allowing the old
man’s voice to prevail. Although Sturt is not usually given to romanticizing, this
passage displays the kind of self-pleasing indulgence Jeff eries sharply rejects in,