The Worm Forgives the Plough

by John Stewart Collis

  Thus I fumed at the thought on Whit-Monday that I had missed the chance of not having to do this. How different was my life now from what it had been! Most of my work had been of a freelance kind. In those days I never knew when Whit-Monday was coming or when it had come. Once, in my very early days, I remember being asked would I like to dine with certain friends ‘tomorrow’. I couldn’t think what was on and it was only after I had excused myself that I found that ‘tomorrow’ was Christmas Day. Weekends meant nothing to me. Now I was privileged to know what these things mean to others who are owned by masters for nearly every day all the year round.

  So now I had the gift of a whole free day. I could enter another world for a change, the world of books. You will never hear me, having done ‘an honest day’s work’, denigrating intellectuals as such. To work day in and day out with the mind only, and never with the body, is as unsatisfactory as to work only with the body – granted. But to sneer at intellectuality is madness. If a person does not develop his mind he is denying his humanity. For there are only two really human traits – the heart and the intellect. To the extent to which a man does not develop his mind (hence also his heart), he is unhuman, not a man, unmanly – however much he may be a ‘he-man’. Since being in the agricultural world, no subject has so continuously and so spontaneously presented itself to me as the problem of education. Up till now the powerful Few have not wished to encourage the Many to become aware of Mind, and most obligingly, the Many have therefore despised it and sneered at ‘book-learning’. But we have to pay so dearly for the faculty of mind that if we do not make the best of it, we might just as well be animals. This gift is our specific means of becoming more – alive. Two things are essential to the real life of man, and neither can be supplied by Act of Parliament: love and intelligence – all else is the machinery of life.

  14 A Harrowing Day

  If getting up early was a curse, the ride down to work was a blessing. It was often an inspiration. I have always loved movement, whether on bicycle, skate, ski, car, or train. Yet perhaps the bicycle is best of all – on a long slope downhill. Add to this an early summer morning, and you have entered heaven. The houses are asleep, and the people have not entered the kingdom, they will not enter it; but the Gate is open, and the fair place lies before you, unstained, unshamed.

  My journey took me straight through the village, past the post office, the grocery shop, the forge, the rectory, the inn. A great copper-beech rose behind the rectory wall, and on the left stood a row of chestnut trees whose mid-May blossoms held up their brief lights until they went out, and over the way a laburnum, till then absolutely insignificant and unnoticed, now aristocratically rose up to pay its dues and taxes, a flaming fountain of yellow flower, further enlightened by the morning rays.

  Arriving in the farmyard, did I find ’E in a pleasing frame of mind? Hardly. On the Tuesday morning I made straight for the oil-can, meaning to fill it – for seeing to the oiling of an engine is one of my strong points. But he yelled across the yard to me to put it down, that it was no good, that it leaked, that he wouldn’t have it used, not by me ‘nor the King of Honolulu, nor anyone’. This unexpected display of wit and learning rather eased the atmosphere in the yard and the others tended to relax their features somewhat. After I had got my oil I wanted some petrol, for which purpose I had a special bottle. All the tins were empty, so it was necessary to get some out of the tank in the lorry. This could be accomplished by sticking a rubber pipe into the tank. You could achieve a flow if you sucked your end for a minute or so. True, this meant petrol in the mouth, but you could spit it out. The operation looks a trifle absurd, and ’E, watching me kneeling down and sucking away at the rubber tube, loosened up and laughed, saying – ‘Collis is drinking beer’, and laughed some more. As a wisecrack, no great claims could be made for it perhaps, but the sight of ’E laughing caused a further relaxation amongst those present, and something in the nature of mirth swept perceptibly across the yard.

  How about mishaps these days? Well I made a point of examining the plugs now before starting up. They very often needed cleaning, and it saved a lot of time in the end. Indeed I became a champion taker-out and dismantler of plugs in quick time (never even dropping the little screw on top!). This meant, by the way, that a clean hand became a thing of the past for me. I have always had a partiality for clean hands and clean feet. Though often going without a bath for a month now, I still never went to bed without washing my feet. But my ideal of clean hands suffered modification. I actually started my agricultural career wearing gloves, and kept it up for some time. I quite abandoned this now, for you cannot deal with nuts and screws with gloves on. And now – such are the tricks of human psychology – I became proud of my grimy hands. They were real workman’s hands. Once, later, when I was pulling beans with Harold on a wet day, our hands became very clean. He looked at his in disgust and said – ‘No one wouldn’t think I done no work!’ And I began to appreciate the real meaning of Edward Carpenter’s remark – ‘I confess,’ he wrote in his Autobiography, ‘I love to see a dirty hand.’

  Though plugs no longer troubled me, other things cropped up of course. Water sometimes got into the forty-gallon paraffin tank in the Yard, and subsequently into my tank. This meant a stoppage after a few hundred yards. But I soon learnt to deal with that, though it meant stopping every ten minutes to clean out the glass basin under the tank. Unfortunately, when anything went wrong with the magneto I was done. I could only gape at it, fumbling without the slightest confidence that I could detect what was wrong.

  One day, though the plugs seemed all right, I couldn’t start up at all, couldn’t get a spark out of her (machines are feminine). Harold came over, and we tried everything for over an hour. There was no chance of making a show before the Van arrived. I hoped it would arrive while Harold was with me also unsuccessful in diagnosis, and I knew that ’E himself would not know what was wrong, for his knowledge of machinery was very superficial. But the Van did not appear by the time Harold had given in, and I went off to get hold of Jimmy, hoping it would not appear before I had returned with him. But it did. Just as we approached the tractor ’E drove up, and got out in a fury, waving his hands about, refusing to listen to any explanation or excuse on my part, and saying ‘You might as well go home!’ We then proceeded to the tractor and Jimmy dismantled the magneto and found the trouble. Impressed by the complication of the work, which took us some time, ’E calmed down considerably. When the Van had gone away again, Jimmy said – ‘He do fly up in the air, don’t he!’ And then added, greatly to my comfort, ‘We’ve all been through it.’

  Later in the day Harold asked me what that trouble had been we had failed to detect, and I explained. But I was surprised that he had not asked Jimmy who must have passed by him on his way back. The fact is they would not have spoken about this, for they seldom spoke to each other, Jimmy being far more resourceful when confronted by any real mechanical difficulty.

  Jimmy, under thirty I should say, was a very cheerful fellow and equally good-looking. Everyone was glad when he appeared on the scene, his smiling face and pleasant turn of greeting warmed up the temperature a lot. He did not very often appear, for when he was not lorry-driving he nearly always, except during the heavy seasons, managed to work in the barn, doing this or that, no one knew what, and they resented it of course. For he was able to get away with it. He was in a powerful position, for he was the man whom ’E was always falling back upon. All the others were amateur mechanics, which is all right up to a point, but modern farm machinery calls for a genuine engineer on the premises. He regarded himself as a cut above the others, despising them for their obsequiousness. He didn’t belong to the agricultural milieu. He felt superior. And as a human being he was superior. They didn’t approve of him, but liked to see his cheerful face all the same.

  Before going off, ’E had told me to go next to a certain field and drag it for couch. On arriving I found him and the carter there engaged in manuring. The har
row was in the middle of the field, and I went over to it and began to couple up. I was in doubt as to which pin would fit this instrument, and was bending over the thing when suddenly a small tempest of a man’s body struck against me, an arm shot past me into the tractor floor, grasped a chain, pulled it violently back, hurling several things with it on to the ground, and the voice of the carter using the customary expletives, said something unprintable. He fixed the chain to the harrow and then went away. But his violence, his apparent rage! Why? I asked myself, why this unpleasantness over what was by no means a momentous matter? I was far from amused at this incident.

  It was a small field so I soon finished this job and went away with relief to the other field which I had not begun in the morning. I hadn’t been there very long when Robert came up beckoning to me, and started yelling. My dog, it appeared, had just been seen going after his sheep on the Down. Now, my dog didn’t run after sheep as a rule and in any case I had seen him a minute ago. But Robert insisted, shouting at the top of his voice, that he had been seen by Harold who had reported it. So I went and looked but could see no sign of him near the sheep. On returning I saw him coming out of the hedge in the field I was working on. He may of course have been on the Down. but was unlikely to have run after the sheep much if at all, and I reflected upon how colossal and critical a thing can be made to assume if you shout loud enough.

  However, before the day was out Robert had cause to thank me. A number of the sheep escaped through a gap in the hedge and began to spread out all over the place. I noticed this, but I couldn’t find Robert anywhere. So I drove them back myself, and filled up the gap. I did not experience any difficulty in getting them all to go in the necessary one direction and through the hole. For there is one pleasing peculiarity about sheep. If you can get a small bunch of them moving towards a given corner, the rest will follow as if the whole lot were tied together with invisible strings – and they will all rush blindly through the gap like water out of the drain in a bath. I wonder was it sheep, rather than swine, that rushed down that steep place into the sea?

  While rolling this field, a very bumpy and stony one, I could see some distance off a lovely rich green field gleaming in the sunshine, all quiet on the agricultural front, and I suddenly wished I could be back in the old days when I could look at such a field seeing only its beauty and peace, and perhaps sit in it knowing nothing of irate farmers and men – a sudden nostalgia owing to my as yet unconsolidated position here, and my immersion in mechanics, my pushing and pulling with bolts and screws, spanners and hammers, plugs and carburettors, and the clatter and rattle of the roller.

  15 Beauty through the Dust

  Though it was June now there still remained some work to be done on fields which were to carry roots. It was worth glancing at the transformation of the fields around. The clover, from ankle-deep, was now knee-deep in rich, dark lusciousness – haymaking being round the corner. A field that recently had only showed lines of burning couch was now covered with a bright green sheet. The field in which sheep were earlier folded was now being ploughed by Harold and dragged and rolled by me. And I was amazed by the good crop of corn now coming up on another field which had seemed to me incredibly stony. ‘Some seeds fell upon stony ground’ – and did very well, it seems. Up to a point stones are an advantage, I learn, in terms of drainage. Yet looking at such a field earlier, so hard, so massively stony, the uninstructed spectator might well be pardoned for wondering how so tender a thing as a seed could derive nourishment there and cover it all with silky greens.

  There in a corner stood the thresher covered up. How inactive it looked, how dead: yet capable of springing into intense liveliness as were the grass-covered drags and chain harrows lying about here and there like old ugly and forgotten thoughts. Over the hedge was a huge straw-rick: I had helped to put it there. And as I looked round and considered each field in turn, I was surprised to find that I had had dealings with every one of them – which gave me great satisfaction.

  The sheep shearing was now in full swing, the large bales of wool being hung up in the barn. It was done by machine shears which completed the whole job in a week. ’E was one of the shearers. Hence it was a week held in the highest esteem by the staff. ‘I wish it was three months,’ said one of them to me, ‘for then you know where ’E is all day.’ A great advantage. No fear of the Van suddenly appearing. Especially at lunch hour. Officially we had half an hour off for lunch between nine-thirty and ten o’clock; and ’E had a way of appearing just when you had sat down for this delightful break, or were about to do so. The staff hated this. They liked to be found working, even though the break was legitimate. It seemed to give a bad impression to be found by the Van sitting down and eating – and of course no boss is ever seen eating. He often arrived just as we were taking that extra five minutes at the end. If he appeared in the middle it spoilt the break, for you couldn’t enjoy your food while receiving instructions and holding conferences and you couldn’t settle down again comfortably till he was out of sight. It was therefore delightful to have a whole week with the knowledge that the Van would not appear, knowing precisely where ’E was – shearing sheep in the barn.

  I was on the last lap of the dragging and rolling now. It was very hot and the ground dry, so that the dust rose in clouds behind the harrow, and the roller was deafening. But at intervals I noticed that the weather was magnificent. The days were gleaming in a manner more often heard about than seen in June, and the surrounding fields and skies were shining with signs and answers and promises and prophecies and praise. The roller clattered, the dust rose, and the tractor gave choking trouble at intervals, but I could not help being aware of that glitter and that gleam. And I marvelled at the thought of night coming soon, the mighty opposite, when all that radiance would go and all those colours pass. A common experience, night following day? Yet we may doubt if between the pram and the bath-chair we will ever see anything more fantastic than this change. Every dawn is the re-enactment of the world’s genesis, and the rising up of the light is the rising up of life. Hence in the radiance of the sunshine men shrink from murder. On days like these I could well understand Macbeth calling upon night to scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, and with its bloody and invisible hand cancel and tear to pieces that great bond which kept him pale.

  16 While Couching

  Some of the meadows were now ready for cutting, so I took the tractor down to the yard to Jimmy, who would now take over. The cutter was power-driven straight from the power take-off of the tractor. It is therefore a much larger and stronger affair than the ordinary cutter. It was certainly a formidable-looking apparatus to fix up. It was necessary to remove half the floor of the tractor and join it to the cutter which has something like fifteen parts – shafts, pulleys, engine, blade, bed. A business of terrific screw-tightening and bolt-fixing. Had I been told to do the job (I was merely Jimmy’s assistant) I would have been stumped by the jigsaw; but it didn’t seem difficult as each part, taken separately, found its place. What struck me most about the mechanic’s operations was that if a hole on the mudguard, say, wouldn’t meet the hole in a given shaft by any amount of pressure, then he didn’t give in but simply made another hole, piercing one by holding it in a vice in the barn. Again if, as so often happened, a screw was too big and would not fix into a given hole and no other screw would perform this office, he didn’t give way to lamentation but put it in the vice and filed it off until it did fit. All very obvious to the initiated, no doubt; and once more I saw that the great principle for a mechanic is to have resource, and a sufficient number of tools and gadgets to make that resource practicable . . . I have just said that Jimmy did not lament. I mean not practically. But verbally his lamentations were so frequent and despairing that I imagined he was hopelessly floored every time. But not a bit of it. He addressed recalcitrant screws and bolts as if they had hearts, cajoling and cursing them, but not, I soon discovered, with any feeling that they ever had the upper hand.

  W
hen I had sharpened the cutter-knives, I took a horse and cart and went to gather up some couch, for Jimmy was going to handle the cutter – at which I was sorry but relieved, for how would I handle any breakdown of that ‘menagerie’? It was very pleasant with the horse and cart in the sunshine – always how pleasant going along quietly in the sun with a cart! And how different today working coatless in the warmth than weighed down with clothes in the cold – to me all the difference in the world! But not shared by the others. They preferred the winter, on the simple ground, they said, that the hours were shorter, half an hour later in the morning and off at five instead of half past in the evening. The heat of summer was regarded as a nuisance – whereas I’d rather have it than champagne. It was not surprising that the sun could give them little pleasure, since they wore underclothes, even pants, all the year round – so that one of the real joys of life, the specific one open to them, namely physical work in the sunshine, was turned into discomfort! As for working without a shirt – at this place it was quite daring to go without a hat. This sort of thing is not the wisdom of the ages: it is merely convention. In some particulars, of course, they are extremely wise with regard to clothing for certain activities, and I find that a case, even a strong case, can be made out for braces – though not on all occasions. But for the most part it is just a question of fashion. You do what the others do, and no one will break the fashion for the sake of comfort or pleasure. For nothing is so strong, so oppressive, so enchainingly tyrannical as the power of fashion. Almost anything can be done, anything could be done, and done daily and calmly, if it is the fashion. Then the mind turns the fashion into a moral. Robert was deeply shocked on one occasion when two land girls rolled up their dungarees above their knees on a hot day. ’E himself was far more broad-minded.