Spirit of Progress Read Online Free PDF

he is a bachelor who, indeed, likes a bit of company and a chat. As he talks, the journalist takes notes. She is, the old woman, Miss Carroll. A pensioner. She arrived in December and pitched her tent. She owns the land and says she will build a sleep-out on it. The tent is temporary. She shops at the local butcher and grocer, and gets water from the farmer’s tank. He offers to help but she won’t hear of it. It’s her pride, he adds. She’s a proud old woman who keeps to herself most of the time. He doesn’t know where she came from and nobody visits her. The farmer knows this, he adds, from the rare chats he’s had with Miss Carroll (rare because Miss Carroll doesn’t stop and chat all that often because she’s not the type), and from what he’s learnt from the locals, who tend to think of her as a strange old bird. The journalist asks him how long he has been on the farm and then realises that he doesn’t know his name either. Skinner, says the farmer. Skinner. A name, the journalist imagines, that belongs to the same age as the clothes that Skinner is wearing, the sort of name that dies out. For names, like certain species of animal life, do die out. Names that you see on oldgravestones, like Rudge and Smead. Names that you don’t see any more, as though when the body dies the name dies with it. And Skinner seems to the journalist to be one of those cases, one of those names. He wonders if certain names have extinction written into them. Doomed to become the sorts of names that you don’t hear much of. Like something out of Dickens but not out of life. And to what extent does the name, Skinner, Rudge or Smead, determine the character? To what extent does the name consign the possessor to the life of the bachelor that Skinner clearly is, so that the family line dies out, and with the death of the body the death of the name? All determined.
    It is one of those idle speculations in which the journalist finds he can indulge while continuing to ask questions. The world may be littered with Skinners, but this is the first one he’s ever met. And Skinner is telling him that his family has owned the farm for three generations, but that he will be the last, since there is no one to take over. It is then that Skinner, possibly allowing the fact to sink in or acknowledging some deep sense of biological failure, looks down at his feet, a glance that is a story in itself. Even if it is not the story the young journalist is being paid to write, it is a story. A story that the writer in the young journalist may write one day and which he dwells on, even as he takes notes. The locals, he is told, call this Skinner’s Farm. But they won’t for much longer. And it is then that he talks about the offers from real estate agents, of their offers to buy the farm and divide it up into quarter-acre lots, the likes of which MissCarroll has pitched her tent on. Skinner, the journalist realises, knows full well that the world his family has created and possessed for three generations will soon pass into History. For, the real estate agents tell him, something called Progress is upon them. Skinner mutters the word and looks about him. This thing called Progress is irresistible, it seems, and the muddy world they are looking upon will soon give way to another and become unrecognisable. And another after that. And another again.
    As the journalist puts his notebook back in his coat pocket he thanks this Skinner, who escorts him up the path to the front gate. It is then that he notices the slightly pigeon-toed walk of the farmer and the way he seems to lean to one side when he walks.
    As he makes his way back to the car and the waiting photographer, the journalist glances back over his shoulder at the solitary figure of Skinner (who nods to him, a nod that strikes the journalist as more than just a goodbye) standing at his gate, leaning slightly to one side, his toes pointed inward, looking out over his property to the horizon, as if he