the MacMurrough Kavanagh, landlords of eminence on the eve of the land war, never evict a tenant of their own name? As Trollope shows in his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, the Catholic landlord who conscientiously sought to fulfil his duty to his ‘people’ found himself beggared with none so sympathetic as the tenants whose failure to pay hammered the final nails into his economic coffin. But there were many who took the simple way out of that trap, by democratically evicting all defaulting tenants regardless of kinship. Family could come into it unpleasantly in many ways. Lord Leitrim, assassinated in the late 1870s, was so heartily disliked by tenantry and family that nobody was ever certain into which category his murderer came – possibly the result of collaboration, each helping each, as in the business of procreation to keep the distant cousin distant. Enid Blyton took up the question of family mutual hostilities over land in Five on a Treasure Island, where the girl George has been given an island formerly the property of her mother, which her father then proposes to sell. Apart from the point of the story, which is that the children know that the island, if left in their hands, looks like producing monetary returns – but since they do not trust him, they cannot tell him – the hard facts are that the island is not George’s father’s to sell. George gave a curious choke. Her eyes burned as if they were on fire. ‘Mother! You can’t sell my island! You can’t sell my castle! I won’t let them be sold!’ Her father frowned. ‘Don’t be silly, Georgina’ he said. ‘It isn’t really yours. You know that it belongs to your mother, and naturally she would like to sell it if she could. We need the money very badly. You will be able to have a great many nice things once we sell the island.’ ‘I don’t want nice things!’ cried poor George ‘My castle and my island are the nicest things I could ever have. Mother! Mother! You know you said I could have them. You know you did! I believed you.’... ‘That’s enough, Georgina’, said her father, angrily. ‘Your mother is guided by me. You’re only a child. Your mother didn’t really mean what she said – it was only to please you. But you know well enough you will share in the money we get and have anything you want.’ ‘I won’t touch a penny!’ said George, in a choking voice. ‘You’ll be sorry you sold it.’ In part it picks up on the ancient Jewish tradition that one lives as long as one’s name survives, and land ownership is the means of its survival. But Blyton manages to convey something beyond that, and of course beyond land use: the Native American determinant of possession. George with her barren
island and its ancient ruin holds the luxury of land ownership, plus the useful reminder that land ownership, however bloody in its historical associations, has at its heart the child’s greed in possession; and the family’s readiness to doublecross one another in the manipulative games land wealth, however imaginary, stimulates. Land is above all snobbish, thus aiding agrarian capitalism to cling on to governmental power decades after finance and industrial capitalism had far outstripped it in economic significance. It might be felt that George (whose love for her island is quite independent of this possible treasure) recognises this and seeks the aristocratic status with no more interest in any attendant finery than we would expect from Fielding’s Squire Western. Like Flurrv Knox in Somerville and Ross’s Irish R.M. stories, she is (given her gender identification) a stable-boy among gentlemen, but (emphatically) a gentleman among stable-boys. She gets on all right with fisher-boys but (unlike Blyton’s Adventurous Four of the same time, 1941-42) not on terms of equality. She is ‘Master George’ to them, inviting their hidden grins at her eccentricity but adopting that so long as she gets the deference she requires as well as the form she requires. The landless labourer was traditionally the despised of all classes, with much more tolerance from landed aristocracy than from newly-rich owners or from tenant-farmers. The Britain of World War II threw the old hatreds into a new context, when the need for male cannon-fodder sent women into the Land Army. Richmal Crompton, who found male authority to wartime volunteers thoroughly obnoxious in her own auxiliary fire-fighting service, had a look at the Land Army in William Carries On: ... Farmer Jenks ... was in these days in particularly difficult humour. His only capable labourer had been ‘called up’ and he was forced to employ a land girl. He hated girls – land or otherwise – so he took it out on everyone around him, particularly the land girl. She was a small slight girl called Katie, with red-gold curls and a friendly smile. When Hubert Lane steals a digging fork from her, she knows what she faces: ‘The old horror’s not found out about it yet,’ she told the Outlaws mournfully. ‘He checks up the tools on Saturday. He’ll be livid when he does. He’ll stop it out of my wages – and I shan’t be able to go home for the weekend. It’s sickening, because I’d made a very special date.’ It was a small window on the exploitation of the lowest figure on the economic ladder, although Katie was better protected than her male predecessors, many of whom in times past had been children sold into ‘apprenticeship’ by their parents and left at the mercy of farmers and landlords from their eighth or ninth year.
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