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Updated: June 12, 2025
He treated these people as her and his inferiors unlike Martin Trevor, he would not submit to being driven round and shown off to Misleham, Picknye Bush, or Slinches.... It was small wonder that respectable families became indignant at such airs. "What does he think himself, I'd like to know? He's nothing but a clerk such as I'd never see my boy."
Now, Dick Socknersh, he would mind her properly, she felt sure.... Day from Slinches had the longest "character" fifteen years man and boy; but that would only mean that he was set in their ways and wouldn't take to hers she wasn't going to start fattening her sheep with turnips, coarsening the meat, not to please anyone.... Now, Socknersh, having never been longer than two years in a place wouldn't have got fixed in any bad habits.... As for Jenkins and Taylor, they weren't any good just common Southdown men she might as well write off to them at once.
"I don't want to be quiet, thank you," said Joanna. She felt thankful that none of the few empty chairs was next Alce's she could never abide his fussing. She sat down between Cobb of Slinches and a farmer from Snargate way, and opened the conversation pleasantly on the subject of liver fluke in sheep.
"He'd never be such a fool as to give up being looker a day before she makes him master," said Cobb of Slinches. "And when he's master," said Mrs. Cobb, "he'll get his own back for her sassing him before Harmer and his men." A few weeks later Socknersh brought the first of the cross-bred lambs to market at Rye, and Joanna's wonderful sheep-breeding scheme was finally sealed a failure.
They were no good either young Cobb of Slinches had married six months ago, and Jack Abbot of Stock Bridge belonged to the Christian Believers, who kept Sunday on Saturday, and in other ways fathered confusion.
"Good sakes! Whatever's the matter with me?" thought Joanna. Her apology took the discreet form of a side of bacon, and Socknersh did not give notice had evidently never thought of it. Of course the shearers spread the story of Joanna's outburst when they went on to Slinches and Birdskitchen and other farms, but no one was surprised that the shepherd stayed on.
Her father would never have acted as she had done; he would not have kept Socknersh a single month; he would not have engaged him at all both Relf of Honeychild and Day of Slinches were more experienced men, with better recommendations; and yet she had chosen Socknersh because his brown eyes had held and drowned her judgment, as surely as they had held her image, so dwindled and wan, when she looked into them that evening, between the setting sun and the rising moon.
You go now and ask Grace Wickens, my gal, to give you a cup of hot cocoa." Young Socknersh went, stooping his shock-head still lower as he passed under the worn oak lintel of the kitchen door. Joanna interviewed the shepherd from Honeychild, a man from Slinches, another from Anvil Green inland, and one from Chilleye, on Pevensey marsh beyond Marlingate.
"There's Joanna Godden saving her tin to buy Great Ansdore," said Bates of Picknye Bush to Cobb of Slinches, as they watched her choosing her shorthorns at Romney. She had Arthur Alce beside her, and he was, as in the beginning, trying to persuade her to be a little smaller in her ideas, but, as in the beginning, she would not listen. "Setting up cow-keeping now, is she?
On this occasion Mene Tekel Fagge brought the news, through the looker at Slinches, with whom she was walking out. "That'll do, Mene," said Joanna to her handmaiden, "you always was the one to pick up idle tales, and Dansay should ought to be ashamed of himself, drinking and talking the way he does. Now you go and tell Peter Crouch to bring me round the trap."
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