A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  The field must be ploughed. It was already October 11th, Old Michaelmas Day, the latest safe day for sowing wheat in the district. Soon those great flocks of starlings, ravagers of seed sprouting from milky berry, would be flying in from Scandinavia. And the rains were due.

  Time was short. Phillip asked Luke to meet him on the field the next day, a Sunday, to help mark out the field for ploughing.

  “I know it’s Sunday, Luke, but we’re late, also there’s a war on.”

  “Sunday work, I don’t hold with that. My grandfather told me as a boy that no good ever come of Sunday work, and I believe it. Mark you my words, no good will come of it. If you order me to, I’ll do it, of course.”

  “No, of course I won’t order you to come. I’ll have to do the best I can by myself that’s all.”

  The next morning, in neat new breeches and buskins, Luke appeared on the field, and showed Phillip how to mark out the field for ploughing on the ground. It involved pacing from the boundaries to find the middle of the field, and then setting up sticks to mark out the shape of the field in miniature. This rectangle was then ready to be ploughed, and the furrows turned inwards along the four sides until the hedges were reached.

  On Monday the three men under Luke began to spread from the centre of the field, helped by the beer-sweating sailor. They worked round four sides of the rectangle, so that while Luke opened-up with the single-furrow drawn by Beatrice and Toby, Phillip followed on the tractor. Having set the boss off, Luke took the olland plough away and left it by the gate; then hitching on a sugar-beet plough set to work to plough-out the beet on the adjacent field called Pewitts.

  *

  The following morning the muck-spreading was left to the sailor, while the others went to work in the sugar-beet field. Luke declared they were behind with this work. Moving down the rows ploughed out by the steward, the men knocked long yellow-white roots together two at a time, to remove soil clinging to them.

  Sugar-beet lifting was at first hard work; but when it had become a habit men wanted to continue at it. What they did not like was to have the rhythm of any job being broken: to be taken off this and put on that, then away again to something else. They liked it no more than Phillip liked having to go here and there by necessity, or having to write at night after a long day picking and shovelling chalk. But the weather had much to do with what jobs should be continued, or discontinued. Luke the steward said to Billy one morning, “Our boss be all wire.”

  “Ah,” replied Billy, “he’s our electric hare.”

  Phillip overheard this remark. “That isn’t so bad a simile for an imaginative worker, you know. The earth really belongs to the tortoise. Our farm is an illustration of Aesop’s fable of the Hare and the Tortoise. When we’re going properly, I’ll be a whole-time tortoise, my son. Now you know how the last tenant sucked this land. He took corn without muck for over twenty years. We’ve got to put back the fertility. I reckon over two thousand tons of spoil can be pulled from the grupps this autumn and winter with any luck. And it shall all go on ‘the Bad Lands’.”

  “Then your farm will be all nettles, I reckon. But you’re master.”

  *

  After one day ploughing-out beet on Pewitts, Luke returned to the Nightcraft to help spread the dung beyond the quadrilateral of the boss’s ploughing. He was also the teamsman, and didn’t consider that labouring was his job. This, on a larger farm, able economically to employ a dozen or more men, would have been the case. However, Luke was willing.

  When in the adjacent field the lines of exposed sugar-beet roots had lain a week to allow the green tops to wilt and their sugar to be withdrawn into the tap-roots—for a plant had its own feelings, Phillip knew, including that of conscious or unconscious panic—Luke said it was time to load. He took up the two tumbrils, and his two men, each with a little curved wrought-iron hook with a beak-like tip, began to lift each a root into his left hand, and with a stroke remove the leafy top together with a slice of the crown. The root was then tossed into the tumbril. Thus the lift-and-top became monotonous and almost automatic. Old sacks were tied round their middles to keep the dew on the leaves from their knees. Each worked one side of the broad tumbril. It was the custom of the country.

  When a tumbril was filled Luke led the mare away to off-load beside the road.

  One morning Phillip interrupted the routine of this work by hurrying over from the Nightcraft to ask Luke to spread muck.

  “I’ve ploughed to where you chaps left off, Luke. Time’s getting on, it’s nearly November, and no wheat in yet. As you know, we’ve been ordered by the War Agricultural Committee to drill fourteen acres here.”

  “You’ve got a good crop of beet here on Pewitts,” replied Luke. He pronounced it the old way, Pew-itts, not Pee-wits.

  “Fourteen ton and more an acre, I reckon, and I don’t see no sense on leaving it in the ground until the frost come to spoil it. Why, if we don’t harvest our crops as they are fit, where shall we be? If you order me to go muck-spreading I’ll spread. But time is getting on, and this beet should be going to the factory. You can always drill oats on the Nightcraft in the spring, come to that. There’s narthin’ comin’ in on this farm, it’s pay-pay-pay all the time, that’s what worries me.”

  “All right, Luke, I’m an electric hare. Better get on with the beet. That sailor chap can’t keep me going, so I’ll put Billy on the tractor and do the spreading myself.”

  “Now you’re talking,” replied Luke. “That’s a good boy, the best hereabouts, we shan’t be in no muddle, you’ll see.”

  The hare was inclined to feel satirical whenever he heard this slogan, mistaking it for the cliché of a closed mind; but he knew that the tortoise had inherited the slow but steady mental work-pattern of the labourer, who must last three score years and ten if he were not to wear out before his time.

  Left alone, Luke hitched Sheba the lead-horse to the shafts, and so began a slow plod across Pewitts to throw off a ton or so of yellow roots on the dump beside the road. Here the lorry would reload them for yet another loading into railway trucks at the station, and so to the Fenton factory.

  The new tumbrils were long and wide. The rubber wheels lightened the tug in the sumpy soil of Pewitts, but the tumbrils did not tip sufficiently for their loads to be shot off. Luke stood on the piled beet, hulling off, as he called it, with a seven-pronged fork, the tine-ends of which were blobbed to prevent them from sticking into the beet.

  Phillip, who tried to cost the crops on his farm, duly entered up in the farm diary at night particulars of the sugar-beet. He had arranged with a haulier to take the beet to the station for 3s. 10d. a ton; the railway journey of eighteen miles to the factory would cost a further 3s. The price paid for each truck-load, after allowance had been made for earth, was assessed on a sample of half-a-dozen roots taken to be weighed before washing, again after washing, and later analysed for sugar-content. The higher the sugar, the better the price.

  Luke remarked one day that the knocking-and-topping of beet was usually ‘taken’, or piece work: so much an acre to knock and top into the tumbril. The men preferred it that way. They would work better if it were taken work, but as it wasn’t he advised the boss to add a bob a day to the wages. The boss at once agreed.

  “You’ll see, there’ll be fourteen ton an acre on here. Pewitts will pay well,” said Luke, rolling himself a fag. “It’s the deep ploughin’ I give it on the Dicker, the lever right down. Turning up ten inches deep the furrows was. I like that little old grey Dicker, it did a good job on here.” He lit the crumpled fag. “If you don’t plough deep for beet,” went on Luke, “you’ll get fang-roots, which hold the soil, and what’s the sense of paying for your soil to go down the factory drain? You’ll see my words’ll come true—fourteen or fifteen ton an acre. It’s the best beet in the district on Pewitts.”

  Phillip knew that Luke’s ‘district’ was the immediate area around the village, where a few smallholders farmed pightles or small parcels of lan
d. There was the local butcher, he whose slaughter-house was closed, who farmed the rector’s glebe with the help of one man, who once a week, at night, with a red lantern went round with the Night Cart, drawn by an old horse. The creosoted contents were added to the village trash-heap, and poisoned the soil; but there it was, part of the decadent village. There were three or four other smallholders, each of whom worked from two to five acres. Phillip thought that if Luke looked only two fields away beyond this ‘district’ to the adjoining fields of Charles Box, he would have seen beet better than that grown on Pewitts. It was a fair crop and no more, judged by what could be seen elsewhere.

  “It’s the best beet in the district,” Luke repeated.

  “Why don’t you use your new ‘Hercules’ bicycle on Saturday afternoon or Sunday and look farther down the lanes?” asked Phillip.

  He knew that Luke seldom used his new bicycle, which was stored in a shed behind his cottage, but continued to use his old machine. “Go and see Charles Box’s steward, ‘Beefy’ Oldstead, and get some ideas from him. You’ll see better sugar-beet grown on better soil than Pewitts. And you’ll also see what difference stubble-cultivation makes.”

  “Not me,” said Luke.

  During the recent harvest Phillip had watched one of the Oldstead sons—all working on Charles Box’s 600-acre farm—travelling up and down the wheat-stubble of an adjacent field while pulling a cultivator whose shovel feet were ripping up living thistle and dead corn-root soon to be shrivelled in the hot sun amidst a loose tilth in which the weed-seeds would chit after the first rain. They would die when ploughed under later on; and the loose tilth would lie under the furrow, making the soil easy for the long tap-roots of the sugar-beet to penetrate the following spring and early summer. Most of the sugar was in the pig-tail extremity of the root.

  “I reckon that stubble cultivation is a waste of money.”

  The hare, running in circles, repeated what it had often said before.

  “Well, as the Sugar Beet Manual I lent you says, if you scarify or cultivate the stubble before deep ploughing, you turn in a nice loose layer of tilth which lies underneath the deep furrow. The frost will make a tilth of the top of the furrow, but not the bottom; and in the spring, when cultivating, the tines don’t get so far down as the bottom of the furrow. So a good farmer cultivates the lower part of the furrow in the back-end, before turning it under with the plough. Thus he gets a tilth twelve inches deep at least with a ten-inch plough.”

  “Huh,” Luke said, “that only turns up rank soil. I don’t think much of that patent. I wouldn’t do it if ’twas my land. I’d keep my money in my pocket.”

  To gain time Phillip ploughed on during dinner-time, while eating his sandwiches. Half an hour later Billy took his place on the sack-covered seat, and Phillip went on muck-spreading. A cold sea-wind was blowing, so he ran down to the workshop for a sheepskin to wrap around the boy.

  Muck-spreading was hard work. It involved flinging away, scattering in an arc, thick lumps from a long-handled four-tine fork. The Arctic-circle air-drift became colder, he sent Billy home, and resumed ploughing. Soon he was chilled; and the hare of his mind began to race upon its wearily repetitious runs across arable and meadow of ‘the Bad Lands’: the rest of the grupps to be pulled clear of weed and sedge before the rains came and flooded the meadows; the self-starter of his motor-car needed attention, it wouldn’t work, although it had been four times to the garage in Crabbe in six months. And he must get something done about the chimney of the farmhouse parlour which smoked so badly that no fire could be lighted.

  Standing there, undecided, he felt the cold wind penetrating his clothes, and wondered if he should be carting sugar-beet, while Luke ploughed out more roots before the frost came. Perhaps the chimney was the most urgent job, for the open hearth must be altered, or the children would be cold. He ought to go down at once and see the village bricklayer about it. The children had to wear their overcoats at night while having their suppers. It was damp and dismal in the parlour without a fire.

  Phillip had removed an old coal-range from what had been originally a wood-burning open hearth. The back had been deepened to allow the stove to be put in, so that when the stove was gone a too-deep hole remained; and the greater the fire of sticks put in, the more smoke and flames came into the room. But was this hole the cause? He had filled it in, but still a fire there was impossible.

  Should he take part of the chimney down before the rains and the frosts came? That would mean a load of sand to be dug and carted from the pit by the pinewood. He could bring it in the trailer behind the Silver Eagle. But the engine would not start. Meanwhile the muck on the Nightcraft must be spread and ploughed-in before the rains came. He returned, and forced himself to work.

  Then Billy returned. “Good man! Bless you, my dearest son. We’ll take turns to spread and plough, and so keep warm.”

  Billy, wrapped in the sheepskin, continued along the south furrow, lifting the twin ploughs at the end of the line, and making a clover-leaf turn, entered the west furrow, which ran parallel with the distant hedge. Then out again, making a looped turn with ploughs upheld by hydraulic pump; to let them down at the join of west and north furrows, thus continuing parallel with the northern hedge. Each time he completed the four-sided figure he was two furrow widths—twenty inches—nearer the respective hedges. This was the traditional way of ploughing in olland—the hay aftermath, the ‘old land’—on the round. Thus no ridges were left where tops had been opened, no shallow finishing places left between the furrows for the 1914 reaper-and-binder in August to bump over, and perhaps break itself.

  *

  While Phillip was furiously spreading muck, to keep ahead of Billy, an army car drove along the drift between the two fields. When it stopped he walked over to meet two officers. They had a requisition order for that half of the field now being ploughed. The senior officer, a major of Territorials, had a white face and dark eyes. He said that very soon huts would be erected there.

  “So your ploughing might as well stop now, don’t you think?”

  “Well, you know, wheat is to be sown here by order of the War Emergency Agricultural Committee.”

  “What?” said the major. “Don’t you know there is a war on?”

  “I think they have probably heard of it in Whitehall.”

  To the steady and angry stare of the major he added, conversationally, that the war was a resumption of the same war which had decimated his generation. At this the major, who wore no ribands on his tunic, looked at Phillip sharply. “You didn’t finish the job properly.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s quite a different war from the last one,” the captain said. “This is a war for freedom.”

  “Every country in every war fights for freedom.”

  “Damn it all, I’m British!” cried the major.

  “Can you substantiate that statement by showing me your identity card?”

  “Do you know who you’re talking to?”

  “That’s what I want to find out.”

  “Haven’t you been served a requisition order? No? Then you soon will be.”

  “Ah, you’re conducting a war of paper! Do you still refuse to show me, as owner of this land, your identity card?”

  “Why should I answer your question? How do I know who you are?”

  After inspection the little army car drove away. Soldiers on his land! Phillip knew what that meant. He knew, too, how the inexperienced officer had felt. Had he himself not been one of those who, in the first war, had felt amused contempt for French or Flemish farmers who went about their business, resenting troops billeted in their barns and outbuildings? Had he not considered them to be mere selfish money-grabbers? The farmers were left great heaps of horse-dung for which they said no word of thanks; they were said to be greedy and exaggerating in their claims for compensation for alleged damage. If their wood was burned for firing by the troops, if their cows were occasionally milked, if their eggs and hens were som
etimes ‘won’, if their hay-stacks were ruined, had not they, the soldiers, come from cold and flooded trenches, where their presence had assured the surly farmers of continued existence?

  That had been the war-time view of the troops, who in their ignorance had thought French and Flemish farmers to be mean and grudging: the troops did not know that horse-dung was almost worthless as a crop-food, any more than the present-day quartermasters in Britain appeared to know, or care, that swill containing broken glass and safety razor blades was poor gift to a man feeding pigs.

  *

  On that late October day of 1939 he returned to his muck-and-chalk spreading as the dreaded rain began to fall. He could spread in the rain, but Billy could not plough, so he told his son to take the tractor down to its place in the hovel: and to remember to remove, with the trowel provided, all the ‘clats’ of soil pressed to the steel wheels, upon the grass of the Home Hills. This, he said, would save the new roads from becoming muddy; and add a needed stiffening of soil to the sandy grazing.

  Rain fell heavily that night. Elsewhere in the district green points of wheat were out of the soil. The Nightcraft wasn’t even sown. The rain continued during the week; and for a further week the tractor could not be used on the land.

  The weather changed with the moon. As soon as they could move on the land Luke with horses and Phillip with tractor started to plough round the rectangle in the middle of the field. He felt that no plant would be able to live in that cold, soggy soil; he could feel that it was not good for wheat. Perhaps it lacked lime, and was acid (the chalk would have no effect for a year at least). He recalled what Luke had told him: that when wheat had been drilled there, four years previously, several acres in the following April had been blank. Luke, then working for the former farmer, had resown with barley.