The Worm Forgives the Plough

by John Stewart Collis

  I had only been working on the land a question of weeks, but one morning as I went past the potato field I realized with what fresh eyes I now could see a field, this field. It was no longer just a bit of earth the beauty of which I perceived from the outside, I saw it a hundred times more clearly, it was a hundred times more real. For I had sown it with potash and superphosphate, I had walked up and down it endlessly, I had counted the minutes nearer the midday meal, I had tried to plough it, I had put down potatoes in the furrows. Already I was no longer an onlooker, a spectator, excluded as if by excommunication from its factual and actual existence. I no longer hung in the void, but had entered in at the door of labour and become part of the world’s work in its humblest and yet proudest place.

  12 Harrowing

  I soon began to use harrows. Formerly, when I had walked across the farm I had continually come across strange-looking instruments at odd corners. Useless things thrown away, they seemed, old rusty chains and spikes with grass growing over them. They reminded me, somehow, of those awful crocodile-teeth traps that used to lie concealed in woods against poachers in the nineteenth century. But I found that these creatures were by no means dead. They were harrows – that is horse- or tractor-drawn rakes for breaking up the soil. There were the three main kinds here: the chain harrow or drudge, the spiked harrow or drag, and the spring tines harrow. Thus now I would go up to one of these rusty abandoned instruments, connect it with the horse-traces and bring it to life. A surprising transformation.

  ‘Only a man harrowing clods . . . ’ Like many others I had read and loved that famous poem by Thomas Hardy called ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” ’. To me just a picture in the mind, no knowledge of what harrowing entailed. Now actualized and made an absolute reality for me – my own job. And does the poem gain thereby? Mr Adrian Bell tells us that he had only been harrowing for a very short time before he began to find fault with the poem. Only a ploughman harrowing; that seemed to him all wrong (that deadly realm of ‘only’) while half asleep as they stalk seemed absurd. I find it difficult ever to say anything against Hardy (except with regard to Tess), but though the message of the poem perhaps requires that ‘only’, there seems to me now no excuse for the ‘half asleep’. From the road a number of agricultural jobs look remarkably quiet, serene, slow, and easy; but if you stand beside the man in question you may find that he is putting out all his strength, is moving quite fast, and is in anything but a serene state of mind. So with harrowing. I didn’t find anything sleepy or serene about it. Not only is it impossible to walk with ease behind the harrow, since you are stumbling the whole time over the clods, but you can’t see your work properly. You try to go straight across the field exactly beside your previous line, but you cannot see it without close inspection, and even when you do see it the horse is always standing you away from it, and in checking this you come back too much. Consequently you have the uncomfortable feeling most of the time that either you are going over ground already done or are missing out considerable areas. In short, it is exasperating. Certainly not something you can do half-asleep.

  However, at first it did not matter to me in the least whether it was exasperating or not. Each thing I did was a new experience, equally interesting to me whether it turned out exciting or dull. And harrowing, above all, gave me great satisfaction. There is a special pleasure in doing something that brings one into line with all ages. While using this instrument I might just as well have been a contemporary of Virgil.

  Nor is the profit small the peasant makes

  Who smooths with harrows, or who pounds with rakes,

  The crumbling clods; nor Ceres from on high

  Regards his labour with a grudging eye;

  Nor his, who ploughs across the furrowed grounds,

  And on the back of earth inflicts new wounds,

  For he, with frequent exercise, commands

  The unwilling soil, and tames the stubborn lands.

  Above, I have been thinking of harrowing the open fields. On this farm I also did a good deal, in fact a lot of harrowing and cultivating between fruit trees – using the horse-hoe (that is several reversed hoes or shoes attached to a tray), the spring tines, the chain harrow, and the leverage cultivator. With this last you can lever the instrument in such a way as to plough into the earth at the very foot of the trees without the horse being stopped by the outspreading branches. This was harder work than using the others, much strength being required to keep it in position; but since skill was also called for, it was most interesting.

  The difficulty with the chain harrow was that in endeavouring to get it as near as possible to the foot of the trees as you went up and down the aisles, the pole of the harrow often caught on them if you were not careful, and barked the barks. This was highly reprehensible. A hideous gash was presented, clearly seen by the inspecting eye. On more than one occasion, having thus gashed a bark, I gathered some grass and then built it round the scar, thus hiding it!

  I generally used two horses for this kind of harrowing – one in front of the other. There was often little enough space to turn them at the ends, but I managed somehow and was proud of the achievement. But on one occasion, when far away in a corner field, one of the horses backed on to the tines, the other became excited, and then both began to pull and kick. They stepped back over the traces which, together with the reins, became an involved mess.

  The horses stopped their stamping. They became quite still. They might have been statues.

  They were simply unable to move. The reins had got into such an extraordinary arrangement that, taut to breaking-point, they were held in opposite directions so that neither horse could move its head. The bit in Prince’s mouth was pressing with an extremity of tightness against the rubbered lower lip. They made no sound – for the most striking thing about horses is their almost total dumbness.

  It was a job to extract them. Not performed without some of the harness breaking. I was tying the several parts together with string when Morgan appeared. ‘I’m afraid you haven’t got a knack with horses, Collis,’ was his comment. A beginner, I reflected, should not make an outstanding mistake or have an emphatic mishap; for the mistakes he has not made, and the mishaps he has not had, will make no impression, while the emphatic error will loom hideously over his head.

  13 Absent-mindedness

  The field that I most enjoyed dealing with was the potato field. First I harrowed away the lines and knocked the soil into small pieces; and when the potato-stems rose above ground, thus re-establishing the lines, I horse-hoed between them. A great deal of attention was given to potatoes on this farm – far more than I have seen anywhere else. Often enough, after a few hoeings, nothing more is done until late in the season when they are earthed up. Much more trouble was taken here. I did much horse-hoeing and a considerable amount of preliminary earthing up – the term used here was ‘shinning’. For this I used the plough that turns a furrow on each side of it – ploughing the earth exactly as a ship ploughs the main. This was a grand job and I never tired of it, nor did it tire me since it made me sweat. It was not ploughing proper, but a close relation to it; and with the plough-handles to grasp and to guide, and the two horses, and a field to myself in a corner of old England, I felt the freedom of having extricated myself from the fetters of modern civilization – a civilization which, for the literary man, is a good working definition of hell.

  Various land girls came and went on this farm. One of them was sent to assist me. She had been working with Mrs Miles and had been worn down by the effort to keep up with her. So she was given a change, and led my leading horse. She confessed that she was ‘mad about poetry’. This was very cheering; for as we progress it becomes more common to meet a person who writes bad books than who reads good ones. So we talked poetry, and I told her how I always hoped that in the course of my ploughing I would come upon a mouse, and thus be able to join with Burns who in November 1785 turned up the mouse that became immortal:

  I’m
truly sorry man’s dominion

  Has broken Nature’s social union,

  And justifies the ill opinion

  Which makes thee startle

  At me, thy poor earth-born companion

  An’ fellow mortal.

  Before leaving the farm, my friend expressed the hope that I would meet my mouse. But I didn’t.

  During some conversation with her she said – ‘You’re so absent-minded they say.’ I was surprised at this. The last thing I had ever allowed myself to acknowledge was anything in the nature of the ‘absent-minded professor’. Later, I faced the matter and thought it out. Evidently I had been the subject of laughing commentary at the tea-table. Was it true after all? Come to think of it, it was true! In ordinary life I had always forgotten things and mislaid them to an astonishing extent. Carelessness shows up badly on a farm. I used to drop things. I would load so many sacks on the cart, and on arriving at the other end would find that two had simply dropped off. Looking round for them I would see, a long way off, a lump on the track! Or I would hang a coat on the hames, and again, at journey’s end, would miss it. I had forgotten all about it and had quite failed to realize that nothing stands jerking about unless it is tightly tied on. But the worst instance of forgetting things was when one day, after the midday meal, I went right across to a field which I had to harrow – without my horse. This was recounted to me by the girl, who added that when I realized that I hadn’t got the horse, I was seen running back madly. Now, no agricultural labourer is ever seen to run – except after rabbits at harvest. The spectacle of me (a) minus the horse and (b) running back to get it, had provided a sufficiently comic picture to raise a considerable degree of mirth.

  I had another habit – one which particularly distressed the boss. When I went from one portion of the farm to another sitting upon the cart, I let the horse go its own pace and did not urge and hurry it on. This gave the impression of absent-minded lolling. Actually, my mind was present to a certain extent while I looked round and took the scene in. But you never know what may make a bad impression. One of the things that makes a bad impression, incidentally, is turning up late in the morning. I mean just a little late – you incur the odium of the other workmen, even more than of the boss. They can’t stand anyone turning up late if they themselves are punctual. I was fairly punctual during all the time that I worked anywhere on the land, though I was always a good distance from the meeting place. At this farm I had a twenty-minute walk before reaching the upper part where we assembled. I shall never forget the Norwegian News (preceding 7 a.m.), the clock, as it were, against which I fought to get ready and be gone! But at one period, owing to an unfortunate remark made by Morgan about it not mattering if I got to the stable before 7.15 as the horses would be eating, I turned up at that time regularly. During this period Arthur Miles always seemed in a black, enraged mood towards me, I couldn’t make out why. It was not for a long time that I realized that it was due to my arriving at 7.15. He just couldn’t bear it.

  But to get back to my method of driving the horse and cart, I am not sure that Arthur’s method had really anything more to recommend it. He was a great urger-on of horses. Yet his technique struck me as curious. As he drove Beauty along (a lazy mare) he would swear at her ceaselessly . . . ‘What the hell are you doing? All right go into the ditch, I don’t care, it’s you that’ll have to take the blank cart out not me, come on you blank sod or I’ll be blank well blanked’, and so on. These solicitations may have sounded as sweet nothings in the ear of Beauty for all I know (and certainly his tone was wholly lacking in either malice or cruelty), and it is fair to say that the mare responded to a perceptible degree. And it made a good show, suggesting the zeal and urgency that appeals enormously to any boss.

  Sometimes a whole morning was spent in carting something to the station, and I fear it was wrong of me to have found this a delightful break. It took a good long time to get there, and one was paid just the same as for hard work. Human nature being what it is, the agricultural labourer loves earning easy money when occasion offers, such as going along to a station on a cart or when rain sends him indoors to a cushy job; while, human nature being what it is, the employer is intensely irritated by the same – for few employers give themselves psychological ease of mind by looking at the thing in the lump and regarding their wage payment as so much a year, instead of seeing it in pieces and feeling when a man is doing such and such a thing, ‘it’s not worth the money’.

  There was a pub along the road to the station, and on one occasion I stopped and had a drink. It struck me afterwards that this would have been regarded as incredibly reprehensible had it been known. I say it struck me afterwards for I was not acclimatized to my new milieu. The freedom of the more favoured professions, doctor, lawyer, writer, BBC man, etc., is scarcely realized by their members: the weekly wage-earner who sells so many hours of his time is owned during those hours. Somehow I didn’t get this clearly into my head at first. But before I was finished with the agricultural world as a labourer, I was keenly aware of a tense atmosphere if I stopped work for a few minutes to hold a conversation or even to pat my dog.

  14 Indignation of Mrs Miles

  As carter, it was often my job to collect sacks of apples and centralize them. One day I was engaged in collecting a number of earlies from a certain portion of the apple orchards where Mrs Miles was working with a number of land girls and ternporary assistants. The sacks were not always properly filled. Feeling full of beans that morning, I said to Mrs Miles in a jolly kind of way, and with what I imagined was an obvious acknowledgement of her as the overseer of the company – ‘Mrs Miles, would you see that they fill up the sacks properly.’ I had hardly finished the sentence when she flew into a rage. ‘I don’t take no orders from nobody!’ she shouted very, very loudly. ‘I’m not taking no orders from you, I only take orders from the boss,’ she screamed seven times, as if I had said something mortally insulting to her. This silenced me properly, and I did not even attempt to start replies beginning with ‘I only said . . . ’ knowing that it would be useless, and I went on my way without rejoicing. While she, I was later informed, continued to rail against me during the entire afternoon. In future I steered clear of any possible repetition of such behaviour, handling her with the respect one pays to a time-bomb which may explode at any minute.

  All the same, she had one more shot at me, as it were, at a later date. I was engaged with a bill-hook on a hedge near a field where hoeing was in progress. Some friends of the boss, or rather neighbouring gentry, had come out to do ‘a spot of work’ for the afternoon – a pretty girl and a somewhat la-di-da young man. After about half an hour of hoeing they began to weary of well-doing, and resting on their hoes looked round the farm. Catching sight of me, a short distance away, I heard one of them ask idly – ‘Who is that?’ Mrs Miles, being present, answered, in even louder tones than usual so as to make sure that I could hear – ‘Oh that’s nobody. He’s only a workman here.’

  I could not help wishing that Mrs Miles could realize how completely she had failed to offend me. There is a certain type of intellectual, of which I am one, who suspects that his observations on life lack something vital, feeling uncertain as to the validity of reflections that owe nothing to experience of everyday work. So with me. Hence I had eagerly grasped at the opportunity of entering the manual working world. A man may do this and still feel an outsider and not accepted as a proper worker by the others. Thus it was with a real sense of satisfaction that I heard the tribute of Mrs Miles, and I was sorry that the irony of this was lost on her.

  But it was easy to say the wrong thing to Mrs Miles. A young lady of the neighbourhood came in and worked quite regularly in the afternoons, knocking off at about four. Being a middle-class girl of pre-war days she was brought up to be permanently out of work (though not receiving any dole). She came along now and hoed with Mrs Miles, going home at four. The afternoons always seem long and she was glad to knock off then. Being a very amiable person, I
heard her say once to Mrs Miles when she was about to leave – ‘I’m so sorry you have to go on till five-thirty, Mrs Miles.’ This was, of course, a fearful psychological mistake. ‘I don’t mind!’ said Mrs Miles in tones which combined intense indignation at the presumed commiseration, with amused contempt.

  Anyway she was certainly a wonderful worker, worth her weight in gold to any employer – she belonged to the old-time type of woman who has always worked on the land, putting in an amount of work seldom witnessed nowadays. She had also another contribution which endeared her to the boss. She had an observant eye, and if anything seemed to have been pinched, say some plums, she would report the same. The boss had carried the technique of ‘being in a hurry’ almost as far as it would go; but, curiously, he forgot his urgency and would stand quite still and pleasantly absorbed if ‘the tale’ was being told, or if someone had a complaint to make about someone else.

  15 The Judes the Obscure

  Most of the ends and sayings, saws and clichés, have their origin in agriculture, and it amused me to find them coming to life. Ploughing a lonely furrow. Putting your back into it. Doing the spade-work. Putting the cart before the horse. Separating the chaff from the wheat, the sheep from the goats. Spilling the beans. Stepping over the traces. Nipped in the bud. Getting the lie of the land. Having a harrowing experience. Barking up the wrong tree. Jogging along. A mere drudge.

  The last-named is really another term for the chain harrow, which I often used on the grass between the fruit trees. The verb which rhymes with it so well, trudge, was certainly born on the land, and fitly describes the job of harrowing. After the interest of novelty had worn off I never took kindly to harrowing, it was too much of a trudge, too drawn out a clod-stumbling amble. The horse gave me the impression of hating it – though I may be wrong. It struck me forcibly, and to my surprise, that here was the job of jobs for a machine, a tractor. I think violent exercise suits me better than steady work, and on these harrowing occasions a certain weariness sometimes overtook me, and going home I often murmured to myself Gray’s lines ‘the weary ploughman homeward plods his way’, wondering how exactly the line went, was it as above or ‘the ploughman homeward plods his weary way’? but never having the energy to look it up.