CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
Also by John Stewart Collis
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
BOOK ONE: WHILE FOLLOWING THE PLOUGH
Preface
Part One: A Farm in South-East England
Part Two: A Farm in South-West England
BOOK TWO: DOWN TO EARTH
Preface
Part One: Down to Earth
Part Two: The Wood
Copyright
About the Book
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE
During the Second World War, John Stewart Collis volunteered to leave his comfortable life as an academic to work on the land for the war effort. His account of this time perfectly captures the soft-handed, city-dweller’s naivety and wonder both at the workings of nature and the toughness of life on a farm. It’s set in the south of England and comprises exquisitely written sections on whatever happens to take Collis’s fancy and inspire his thoughtful curiosity, ranging from humorous sketches of the characters he works alongside; mini-essays such as ‘Contemplation upon Ants’, The Mystery of Clouds’, ‘Colloquy on the Rick’, ‘Meditation while Singling Mangolds’, ‘The Garden of Eden’ and celebrations of the earthworm, pea and potato. His mind ranges far and wide through literature science and philosophy as well as amazing descriptive writing, which makes for a book that is as uncategorisable as it is enchanting.
About the Author
John Stewart Collis was born in 1900. His father was a Dublin solicitor and Collis was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1925 he published a biography of George Bernard Shaw and he went on to write other biographical works. He later became a pioneer of the ecological movement in Britain. During the Second World War his wife and daughters were evacuated to the United States and he worked for the Land Army as an agricultural labourer on farms in southern England – accompanied by his beloved dog, Bindo. His memoirs and meditations on rural life, While Following the Plough (1946) and Down to Earth (1947) were first published together as The Worm Forgives the Plough in 1973. John Stewart Collis died in 1984.
ALSO BY JOHN STEWART COLLIS
Shaw
Forward to Nature
Farewell to Argument
The Sounding Cataract
An Irishman’s England
An Artist of Life
Marriage and Genius
Leo Tolstoy
The Carlyles
Bound Upon a Course
Christopher Columbus
Living with a Stranger
The Vision of Glory
The cut worm forgives the plough
WILLIAM BLAKE, Proverbs of Hell
The Worm Forgives the Plough
John Stewart Collis
INTRODUCTION
‘I am anxious to say a word about the potato’, begins the second part of The Worm Forgives the Plough. And there, really, you have John Stewart Collis in a nutshell, or at least a tuber. The mock deference (that hat-holding ‘anxious’); the dry humour, trading on bathos; and the interest in those scraps and squibs of the world over which the eye usually slides. For Collis – woodsman, ecologist, biographer, farmer, memoirist – was animated by what he called ‘the extraordinary in the ordinary’. To him, ‘mundane’ meant fabulously-of-this-earth, rather than tediously commonplace. He was (to borrow a phrase from another farmer-naturalist-writer, Les Murray) ‘only interested in everything’. His imagination was unmotivated by grandeur; he experienced beauty as a scalable quality: present in a sky-filling cloud reef, yes, but equally in the leaf litter on a wood floor. His only fixed beliefs, as far as I can tell, were that work – labour; contact; touch – was a prerequisite of durable knowledge, and that cutting dung-slabs from dung-heaps was pretty much the nicest task known to man.
John Stewart Collis was as old as his century. Born in 1900, while the Siege of Mafeking was underway, he died in 1984 during the Miners’ Strike. At the age of twenty-five he published his first biography (of George Bernard Shaw; the book is still well-regarded by Shavians). Lives of Havelock Ellis, August Strindberg, Leo Tolstoy and Christopher Columbus followed over the subsequent fifteen years. Then the Second World War began. Collis was offered a post in the Army, but he asked instead to become an agricultural labourer: one of a few thousand men and more than eighty thousand women – The Land Girls – sent to the countryside after 1940, in order to replace the farm workers who had enlisted. ‘I had hitherto regarded the world too much from the outside, and I wished to become more involved in it,’ Collis recalled, when asked why he had chosen to work on the land. ‘I wished to become thoroughly implicated in the fields’. One notes with pleasure his use of the verb ‘implicate’, recalling its etymological origin as a strenuous action; from the Latin plicare, to fold or twist.
And he did become implicated, strenuously so. For almost six years Collis laboured, in various capacities and in various parts of England. First as a bottom-of-the-pile farmhand on a fruit and arable farm in Sussex: hoeing, stacking, spraying, harrowing. Subsequently on a dairy and arable farm in Dorset: hiling, broadcasting, rick-building, ploughing. Then after the war he was offered a job thinning a fourteen-acre ash wood near Iwerne Minster in Dorset. For a year, Collis toiled alone in the wood, clearing the understory of honeysuckle and ivy, and felling trees by axe and handsaw – wanting nothing more than to be where he was and engaged in what he was doing.
Two remarkable books arose from these years, which are now published together as The Worm Forgives the Plough. The first, While Following the Plough (1946), describes the wartime work in Sussex and Dorset; the second, Down to Earth (1947), the year spent in the ash wood. Both books are structured as a mosaic of tiny essaylets, riffs, visions, meditations and comic set-pieces (such as ‘My Furrow’, where he describes ploughing his first field-length, the result resembling a woozy sine-wave rather than a furrow; or his account of the blustery farmer Arthur Miles, whose favourite – and often only – word was ‘bugger’). It strikes me that the books could respectively be subtitled In Praise of Work and In Praise of Idling, with no contradiction of spirit implied between them. For Collis, work lent a lustre to laziness, and laziness – in its full form as a virtue, meaning restorative haystack-snoozes, tree-foot meditations, physical down time – burnished work.
Collis was living and writing on the eve of an agricultural revolution. In the two decades after the Second World War, British farming was transformed. The corn-rick and the hayrick became extinct. The subsidy system was enshrined by the 1947 Agriculture Act. The small family farm began its decline, and the mega-farm its rise. Monoculture widely replaced the patchworked and improvised farming that Collis experienced. Chemical fertilisers and pesticides were used in escalating quantities. ‘The change of scene followed rather swiftly’, wrote Collis with characteristic understatement. ‘Thus this book is about the last of its kind that can now be written in England.’
Collis isn’t an elegist, however, though his books do possess a back-echo of sadness and loss. No, he was far too allergic to sentiment to mourn the arrival of full mechanisation, or the passing of an era. Nor is he a nature writer, whatever that is. If it’s worth calling him anything, then he’s probably a writer of the land (that’s ‘the land’, with its hard-won definite article, rather than ‘landscape’, with its associations of leisure, tourism, the view). His great subject is the ‘unique struggle’ of the labourer with the earth: a battle that incites affection, boredom, exhaustion and delight in mixed measures. Here he is on that subject, letting Old Testament rhythms rumble around his prose like apples in barrel, half-seriously, half-parod
ically:
The spirit of the ancient Earth is sterner [than that of water]. Her demands are not only too great, but too constant to allow those who battle with her any relaxation, any contemplation, any ideology, any interest in the spirit and the mind . . . He shall be kept submerged in his great task by perpetual apprehension of failure and ruin.
Collis is no elegist, also, because he lives so intently in the present. He writes wonderfully of physical pleasure. ‘To sit in the sun. This is still one of the greatest experiences of life for us in the West . . . I have said I sat in the sun, but more often I lay in it.’ Falling asleep under an ash tree, he finds himself ‘almost sinking into, melting into the earth’, experiencing ‘a joyous sinking down . . . I became little higher than an animal – and no lower.’ He recalls heaping ash logs onto a hearth-fire, and how ‘the bitter cold of a winter’s evening was transformed by the white-hot wood, and I was nearly as happy in front of this earthly flame as in the summer under the sun.’ In his love of heat and sunshine, he’s kindred with another unsentimental English pastoralist, Richard Jefferies, who once described feeling the sun play upon him so powerfully that it seemed to blaze through every cell, and melt him into the grassy Wiltshire hillside on which he was lying.
Collis’s other family resemblance – less expected – is to Samuel Beckett. In August 1942, the French resistance cell with which Beckett had been working for two years was compromised. He and his wife Suzanne fled – escaping by hours from the Gestapo swoop – and worked their way south through France, eventually reaching the village of Roussillon, not far from the Côte d’Azur. There they settled, and for nearly three years, Beckett worked unpaid in the fields, woodlands and vineyards of a nearby farm: pruning, picking, harvesting, clearing. He became respected among the other workers for his powers of endurance under even the fiercest summer sun, and his apparent indifference to tedium or injury. It was during these same years that Beckett wrote one of the great works about work, his novel Watt, in which phrases loop and repeat to create an atmosphere of antic tedium, of agitated boredom, of longing for an end that never comes. Both Beckett and Collis brilliantly evoke ennui and its different shades; and both know the ability of certain kinds of labour not to stimulate thought but to abolish it entirely. Yet where Beckett chose to embody the experience of work grammatically and formally, Collis preferred to describe it. Reading Beckett is effortful; his prose exerts the reader. Reading Collis is easy, joyful.
‘I do not possess the politician’s and the sociologist’s imagination to grasp the actuality without precision’, Collis once observed, acidly. ‘I have to get in touch with it first through work. For me it is first the tool, then the book’. In this respect, he belongs to a very English intellectual tradition of enlightenment through work: a dynasty of male manual mystics that begins with William Cobbett, includes John Ruskin, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Henry Williamson, H.J. Massingham, Rolf Gardiner, Collis himself, George Ewart Evans, and ends up latterly with Roger Deakin, whose Wildwood (2007) contains some of the finest writing about wood-work – the work of wood, work with wood – since Collis. ‘I continually have day-dreams of a time when lots of people would come out into the fields and love working with their hands,’ writes Collis, sounding just like Ruskin, ‘and also love working with the mind . . .and make such jobs as these go quickly and delightfully’. His book is a manual in the full sense of the word. Read it, and you’ll learn how to keep an axe sharp; how to cut a tree down, leaving a clean cuneiform summit to the stump; how to stack a rick (it requires an audacious cantilevering technique), how to hoe mangolds, how to subdue spraying machines, and many other such things you never knew you wanted to know.
Of course, several of these work-worshippers developed thoroughly repellent politics. It has often been the case – and especially among English land-lovers – that writers about ‘connection’ with place entangle themselves in dubious thought. The idea of ‘connection’ leads quickly to ‘belonging’, and ‘belonging’ leads of necessity to ‘exclusion’, and so the chimera of ethnicity based on descent and homeland is summoned. Take Henry Williamson, for instance, who farmed land around Stiffkey in North Norfolk, travelled to Nuremberg to hear Hitler in 1936, and on his return joined the British Union of Fascists, contributing articles on agriculture for Moseley’s journal Action. Then there was Collis’s acquaintance Rolf Gardiner, who owned the ash wood which Collis thinned. Gardiner was a heterodox and largely untrustworthy interwar prophet, whose ambition was to reintegrate culture, work and religion through an organic relationship with the land. His thinking began harmlessly enough – extolling Morris Dancing as a way to cleanse the male soul, for instance – but curdled over time into a Saxon revivalism, and eventually into a full-blown Blut und Boden Germanic vision of the need for ‘blood contact with the living past of the English earth’, of agriculture as a means of contact with the ‘holy soil’, and of the need to restore a robust peasant class.
Given his connection to Gardiner, Collis’s writing is remarkably free of taint. Collis was protected in part by a common-sense Fabianism, born out of his early contact with Shaw. But he was also protected by the deep structure of his metaphysics. Collis was an inductive thinker, which is to say he believed in things before ideas, and this – together with his allergy to sentiment – left him intuitively suspicious of totalising systems of thought. Large-scale political visions falsely inverted the relationship between idea and thing:
I have spent some time in the company of the philosophers and the priests, and have undertaken long journeys with them in search of the Absolute. It was all necessary. For only then could I understand that it was not necessary, and that if we look out of the window the answer is there.
Collis approached the world from a presupposition of his own ignorance. His dreams of a world in which people loved to work were not – unlike Gardiner’s – programmatic in nature. They were dreams only; idle doodles, jotted fantasies of a world where all Cabinet Ministers were first cabinet makers. At its simplest, indeed, The Worm Forgives the Plough is a book about learning how to see, rather than learning how to live: ‘I realised with what fresh eyes I could now see a field, this field . . . I no longer hung in the void, but had entered in at the door of labour and become part of the world of work in its humblest and yet proudest place’.
Collis is also funny, where Gardiner was not: mischievous, satirical, irreverent, and sharp-taloned with regard to pomposity or excessive sincerity. Early in the first book, he reflects how many simple problems on a farm can be solved by wire: wire used to twist and tighten, to fix this to that, to hook and fasten. Humour is Collis’s writerly version of wire, with which he hitches section to section, thought to thought, in his fabulously disjointed books. His favourite comic mode is that very English technique of litotes. To say Collis uses understatement to good effect would be an understatement. He seems to have realised that litotes was the ideal manner in which to write humorously about work and exertion, offering as it does the greatest economy of effort. ‘I have no objection whatever to standing on a dunghill. There is no place where I am more content to stand’; ‘The elder is a bush posing as a tree, a tree failing to be a bush’. Sometimes his one-liners take the form of swipes. ‘There is a tendency amongst some passionate middle-class meliorists to give the working-class man virtues he does not possess.’ Whack! ‘It is surely the mark of an inferior mind to be moved to wonder by the exception instead of the rule.’ Slam!
I am always wary of those declarations that X or Y is ‘a book that everyone must read’. The imperative is alarmingly coercive, smacking of diktats, of the Little Red Book, or that ill-imagined ‘cultural initiative’ whereby every second adult in Holland was issued with a free copy of Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury (a novel so toothless and un-angry that it should have been retitled Furry). But The Worm Forgives the Plough is, unmistakably, a book that a lot of a people should read. Like many British works written in the later 1940s and 1950s, its time looks to have come r
ound again. The carousel has turned: the post-war atmosphere of selective austerity, deferred desire and earned pleasure, sustainability rather than waste, a yearning for connection and contact, is recognisable once more. Collis’s love of the land and of work, his warnings about the disconnect between town and country, between consumer and producer (the ‘agreed fantasy of illusion’), and about the easy seductions of the pastoral, all feel very contemporary. ‘In towns men have become so far removed from the soil’, he writes, ‘that when we hear that a man has “soiled his hands” we know that he is suspected of crime’. Today, apocryphal stories circulate of British schoolchildren not knowing that milk comes from cows, not being able to identify a cucumber in a line-up of vegetables, and not being able to match leaf with tree. More pragmatically, Collis was attracted to non-intensive and mixed-method farming practices that now need to be embraced again. And more metaphysically, his practice of hewing close to the felt world, and his trusting to sensation as a kind of thought, appeal to increasing numbers of people. As he put it himself, ‘I need never go out of fashion. For I have never been in the fashion. I am always with it.’ Just so.
Robert Macfarlane, 2009
BOOK ONE
WHILE FOLLOWING THE PLOUGH
PREFACE
‘WHAT MADE YOU go and work on the land?’ I have so frequently been asked the question that perhaps an answer should be attempted. When a reason is completely obvious to oneself it is often difficult to explain it. Since ‘because I very much wanted to’ will not serve, I must be more explicit. While not refusing the term ‘an intellectual’ as applied to myself, since I believe in the Mind more than in anything else, I had hitherto regarded the world too much from the outside, and I wished to become more involved in it. The war gave me the opportunity. The previous war had left me as an Honorary Lieutenant in the Irish Guards, for it had stopped when I was at an Officer Cadet Battalion, and in 1940 I was offered an Army post. Since it was clear to me that I would be given some home job for which I should be entirely unfitted, I asked to be excused in favour of agriculture. This granted, I gained the opportunity of becoming thoroughly implicated in the fields instead of being merely a spectator of them.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 1
