The Worm Forgives the Plough

by John Stewart Collis

  Having reduced the rick to its foundation, we stood on its bedding of straw. Under this were a number of rats. A ring was formed and everyone stood armed with a prong or shovel. Every second someone poked a rat and slashed at it. Rats began to fly in the air like balls, one actually alighting on ’E’s hat. Soon about twenty were disposed of. Then a large one escaped behind a horse-rake and ran under the straw-rick. This did not ensure its escape. The carter dived down on his hands and knees beside the hole where it had gone, thrust in his arm, and in a second drew forth the rat in his ungloved hand. Waving it in the air by its tail, he smashed it down triumphantly on the horse-rake.

  In the course of the next two weeks we finished off the remaining ricks. And we were joined by ’E’s two sons, who though officially still at school, did a great deal on the farm. They were twins. In build they were not in the least like their father, being extremely slight and thin. Yet both, even in their teens, could do very nearly a man’s work. They worked with the same rush and zeal as their father. One of them, Reggie, was gay-spirited, the other, John, was earnest to a degree probably never surpassed. There are cases when farmers’ sons are in the same position as boys without literary leanings who are forced to appreciate Shakespeare, thereby acquiring a distaste for all things cultural. When farmers’ sons have no leanings towards agriculture, I can conceive nothing more calculated to put them off it for ever than being forced to do it as soon as they can be of use, and forced to hear nothing but talk about it. However, by the nature of things this is rare. Certainly these boys had a decided liking and aptitude for agriculture and an equal abhorrence of anything cultural. They stayed away from school as much as possible to be on the farm. And that was very sensible. They had the one skill they were interested in, and they knew that miscellaneous knowledge, quickly forgotten, was absolutely useless to them. There was only one thing necessary to teach them to make them finally efficient at their coming profession, and that was not taught at their grammar school – namely manners. Very necessary when the time came to deal with men in their employment. But they had no exams in this, unfortunately. Thus their popularity with the staff was not marked.

  Anyway the fact that they now turned up for threshing meant that I changed my position from being on the corn-rick to that of Robert’s assistant on the straw-rick. This was a great improvement. There was much less dust and the job was easier. The golden river of straw flowed up the hill of the elevator and fell at my feet, needing only distribution. And now I rose while others sank. I could get a calm view of the general proceedings, the fat grain-sacks steadily multiplying, the sheaves diminishing, the straw increasing. The vastness of the mystery was so actual before the eye. That field there, sown less than a year ago with only a few sacks of seed: now all this straw coming up, all that grain flowing out. How well the cinema could show this sort of thing on a big fascinating scale, I reflected. It could show in quick succession, first the sowing, then the appearance of the light green shoots, darkening, browning, yellowing: then the carrying and ricking and threshing. To do it properly would no doubt be expensive, but hardly more so than the expense of some elaborate pictures evidently produced by infants.

  My place on the straw-rick also gave me a clear view of the well-known peculiarity about threshing. As soon as the tractor has been started up and the belts begin moving a curious change takes place in the situation. Up to now the human beings have had the matter well in hand, taking their time, fixing belts, and getting things ready. But as soon as the machines get going the atmosphere is changed. One gets the impression that the thresher is now more important than those who minister to it. It has evidently become alive. The first consideration of a living thing is food. To get food most creatures have to strain after it. Not so the thresher. It needs bread, certainly one rick a day, which is a fair-sized loaf: but all it has to do is to stand there while men feed it. And they mustn’t let up for a minute. If the ever-open mouth doesn’t get its sheaf in good time such a hollow roar comes up from the depths of the animal that its menials nervously hasten to hand up the food at double-quick time. Seen from the moon, as it were, the spectacle would look disquieting. If, quite ignorant of the existence of any machines, we turned a corner and suddenly came upon such a scene, it would be sufficiently surprising. There is nothing quite like it, this weird monster of man’s conceiving, which, hour after hour, does really chew, digest, and pass out the very bread we eat.

  5 Drilling

  The next operation in our sequence was the sowing of a hundred-acre field with barley. Hence I became familiar with the drill for the first time – the big Canadian double affair that drops artificial at the same time as grain. Mounted on two wheels, two separate long thin boxes are drawn across the field by a tractor. You open the lid of each box, pouring artificial into one and grain into the other. As the drill moves forward the two things trickle down through pipes to the earth, or rather, right into the soil. Thus you can sow with a drill in a strong wind and yet be sure of an equal distribution of seed throughout the field in parallel lines. Two men are necessary: one to drive the tractor, and the other to stand on the platform of the drill and keep an eye on the supply in the boxes and see that all is falling down according to plan.

  Early in the morning we went out with wagon-loads of barley-seed and artificial on to the hundred-acre field. We had our own drill and also a hired one. These drills are nine feet wide; so that two going hard at it can cover plenty of ground in a few days.

  We hung about at first in the cold wind, waiting for ’E who had not arrived; for though instructions had been given with regard to the end we were to start from, and which portion to do first, no one was clear about this, and no one would take the responsibility, nor was the extra man in charge of the hired drill fertile in suggestion, simply saying – ‘’E didn’t tell me nothing about it.’ No initiative was taken; nor did I ever find it taken even in the simplest matters at any time; it was always – ‘Better wait for ’E.’ Thus we stood about in the wind for some time.

  At length the Van arrived and operations were set in motion at once. Taking it by portions, the two drills went round and round the given portion, stopping as they passed me for refilling with seed and manure – for I was the feeder. The carter stood on the platform of the hired drill, while ’E stood behind Harold, our tractor-driver. Since the circle round which the drills raced was a big one I had time enough to get the corn and the manure poured out into the bucket before they appeared, one closely following the other.

  Just before dinner I was told to take a wagon and fill up with a dozen two-hundredweight bags of barley which were on another wagon beside a rick in a further field. This was the first occasion when I had to handle two horses (one in front of the other) drawing a wagon, thus when it came to backing the wagon so as to go neatly alongside the other wagon with the sacks on it, I found it anything but easy. A wagon is not at all like a cart; having four wheels, the first pair being on a swivel, backing becomes an art in itself – for if you do not go back straight you will go mighty crooked! And if one horse does not behave properly and shies every time an aeroplane overhead fires at a target (our constant accompaniment), things are thus made no easier. Hence, by the time I had got my wagon alongside the other and had loaded up, it was well into dinner-time, and well past it when I was back on the drilling field. Being the sole feeder of the drills I couldn’t very well stop for my food, and had to eat it as opportunity arose. We did not stop at five-thirty, and as no one had taken out any tea we did not stop for tea, but went on till seven-thirty. On this particular day – this has often happened with me – I had taken out far too little for dinner. Thus by five-thirty it became a real question of belt-tightening. I reached home by eight-thirty. Then did I enjoy sitting down! And did I enjoy my food! Pleasures normally denied me. Two simple and extreme joys missed by millions of men for no better reason than that they can sit down and eat when they like.

  The next day the same thing happened during dinner-hour. I
had to go right down to the farmyard to load up twenty sacks of artificial. Having arrived there, the question rose, how to elevate them? It was simply solved. This farm was not lacking in equipment, and there was a sack-lifter in the barn. It is like a short ladder with one rung. You put it against your wagon, wheel a sack to it (there was also a sack-wheeler, for which many thanks) and let it slip on to that one rung which is on the ground; and then you turn a handle and force the rung upwards and tip your sack into the wagon.

  So far so good. It only remained to go back with the load. Unfortunately I did not make a clean exit. I knocked down a gate-post. The reason for this was simple: in leading the front horse round out of the yard I walked on the right-hand side of the horse instead of the left, which is a mistake as elementary as walking too close to a horse – for which there is often excruciating punishment from the hoof. I thought it advisable to make a general confession of this on my arrival on the field. ’E took it well, as he always took all such things. Harold thought it a great joke, saying that the carter would have to stand up there all night instead of the post. And even the carter himself only said – ‘Christ!’

  On we went again, my expedition having cost me the whole dinner-hour. I continued getting the buckets full with seed and artificial. In a current number of the Farmers’ Weekly, artificial had been called ‘little pills of comfort’. I quoted this to ’E who handed it on as a great joke – for he was far from being a surly man when things were going well. As the circle grew smaller and smaller the tractors came round sooner and sooner. I did not now have to feed them each time, but all the same I was not always ready for them. Though much of the equipment had cost over four hundred pounds per item, there had been economy over buckets. They were too small for the job, it was the devil filling from a full sack. Also, the ICI sacks were tied in a peculiar way and could only be opened in a trick manner – which sometimes failed and caused ill-spared delay. Rain loomed ahead and the pace was quickened.

  From the road, I have no doubt, our scene looked leisurely and quiet. How different the reality, I reflected, now that I was in it. Everything in a hurry. Anxiety, hustle, nervous tension – anything but the serene rural atmosphere we hear of in books: more in the nature of a battle which by inadvertence may at any moment be lost. And from the field, how far away seemed the outside world that passed by on the road! We did not belong to it, and it knew nothing, cared nothing. Yet all its ways and all its tramping depended upon us; by us upheld in its trance and dream; by us made insolent and by us given power. I had come from that outside world, and many a time reflected here upon what now seemed the slack and sloping ease of city people whom I knew. But on this day, while here on this field anyway, I felt no desire to join them. Rather did I feel that I had escaped from the company of dream-walkers into the company of people who were awake and putting out all their strength, without which effort things can never be kept going. Here in the middle of this big field I at last began to feel really inside the agricultural world, part of it, one with it, and was well content to let the distant prancing devil’s dance of nonsense, farce and folly fare without me.

  The drills began to close in now, my patch becoming smaller at every round, until at last I was driven off it, and had to take up my position in a portion already sown, so that myself and my gear would not get in the way of the vehicles. Once when I had left a sack in the line of an approaching non-stop tractor, the carter leapt from the platform, rushed ahead, threw back the sack, and leapt on again – all for the benefit of his old man who could see the exhibition from close behind. At length the job was finished late in the evening of the third day, and we withdrew, leaving Nature now to get on with it.

  6 Sheep

  While putting a sack of cake into the shepherd’s hut – which resembled a bathing-box on wheels – I looked round inside. In certain respects it suggested a cloakroom. A line of lambskin coats hung from pegs. Wondering who wore these coats, I remembered how the shepherd had told me that he used them for disguising lambs who couldn’t milk from their own mothers. Thus, if a ewe lost a lamb and another ewe wasn’t giving milk, he put the latter’s lamb to the ewe that had lost hers – first dressing it up in the dead lamb’s skin. I wish I could have had an opportunity to watch this impersonation of a lamb in lamb’s clothing.

  My own liking for sheep is limited. As a flock they may fairly be said to be more pitiful than human beings. Their deplorable lack of self-possession and confidence, their perpetual hurrying and scurrying, their weak faces, their ceaseless maaing and baaing make one feel somehow they have got lost in evolution and are in a frightful state of anxiety about it.

  Yet it is no wonder they feel bewildered and lost. Like so many creatures, they are now half created by Nature and half by man. The result is that they are now dependent upon us for everything – while we, of course, have to wait upon them hand and foot as we do on cows, the sheep-waiters being called shepherds and the cow-waiters being called cow-men. They have now so little control over their bodies that a slight hollow in the ground may make them fall over while grazing, and if they do fall over they cannot get up, and often die in twenty minutes. And we may be sure that it is not due to Nature but to us that they become the prey of worms.

  There is very little that is romantic about sheep, though for some reason they enter both literature and painting in an idyllic manner not bestowed to an equal extent upon other stock, while it will be some time before the shepherd loses his poetic place. The ‘milkmaid’, now called a Land Army girl, is ceasing to make any strong appeal to the muse; but the shepherd is still conceived of a haze, for few people know what he actually does. They would be surprised if they knew how heavy a single hurdle is, and that a shepherd needs to be a particularly strong man since he has to move them continually, and carries from two to four at once (I know one who could carry eight). And he is seldom seen searching for a dear lost sheep and rejoicing over it when found more than over the ninety-nine others that did not go astray; he is more often discovered searching their bodies for maggots and finding plenty, whole rings of them worming their way through the wool, through the skin, through the flesh into the very bones – an invasion which, if unchecked, will lead to hideous sores, huge patches of desolated flesh and red clefts in which are clearly seen the reeking ribs.

  I write with some feeling about this, for though I had nothing to do with sheep at this farm, it is proper to mention here that I have since had occasion to lend a hand with them in the administration of pills, and also at dipping. It was a question of giving a hundred sheep four pills each (or rather four to the ewes and two to the lambs) against worms. Actually I failed to give a single pill to a single ewe by myself. It was all I could do to sit one up on its haunches, let alone open its mouth. We had them penned in a short space, so it was not difficult to catch hold of the lambs. But it was a game getting a several-hundredweight ewe into a sitting posture, and in my efforts to do so I frequently assumed that position myself, covered with the slobbering saliva of the sheep beside me whose agitated countenance betrayed ill-concealed dislike. The dipping was dirtier but slightly more easy. After penning up the flock beside the dip, it was only a question of catching hold of the sheep, lifting them over the step, and lowering them in. Several of the ewes were so bulky that I failed to lift them up the necessary distance. The splashings and general excitement relieved their bowels, and soon the sand floor became very slippery and their wool discoloured. What with that and the splashes from the yellow fluid, it was a job calling for very old clothes and a bath afterwards. All the same, contact with sheep, my mate assured me, is good for the health. He said that breathing sheep odour is the healthiest odour, and cures anyone in a low state. His wife’s father was thus cured, and he went down again when he left sheep. His brother had to go to hospital after dealing with cows, then went to sheep and became strikingly well . . . So it seems doctors should not say – Go to the Riviera, but simply Go to sheep.

  I allude to these operations since th
ey served to clarify my mind with regard to sheep, and to take them out of the haze of half-perception. It was no doubt theoretically possible for Mary to have kept that small lamb; and when she went places it could possibly have accompanied her. But I wish we could have been told more about that phenomenal child’s dealings with the lamb, for it seems to me now that her choice in pets must have been attended with grave disadvantages. Not that I question her existence. In 1938 my wife and I were in Germany, and had been journeying for a long time without meeting anyone or coming to any village: but at least we came upon a lonely house by the wayside. There was no sign of life anywhere. Then we saw, sitting on the steps and leaning against the closed front door of the house, a little girl about Mary’s age as we imagine it. Beside her, with its head on her lap, was a sheep. It should have been a lamb, but it was an adult, quiet, unbleating sheep with an exceedingly amiable countenance. It gazed up towards Monica, and Monica gazed down towards it with her arms round its neck – a most peaceful, unhistoric scene. I say Monica, for my wife took a photograph of this companionship, and the girl gave her name as Monica and the sheep’s name as Hans. She accepted a piece of chocolate; and as I left Monica and Hans, much appreciating their ideological position in the Third Reich, a deep voice, proceeding, it seemed from Hans, said – ‘Danke schön, auf Wiedersehen.’

  7 The Machine-milker

  My contact with stock here was confined to spreading straw for the heifers and dumping hay in the shed beside one of the dairies, which adjoined the pig run. Pigs are very attractive animals. When a body of them are all together, all snorting and making a general row, and you suddenly appear, silence will immediately fall on the assembly. Indeed, the attention is so encouraging that I have sometimes been tempted to emulate St Francis and preach them a sermon. Next to their intelligence I would place their cleanliness: they don’t mind a bit of mud and appear even to eat it, but they are very clean in essentials. As for the sows – there we come upon great personalities, though often rather supercilious in countenance. The only thing about swine is that they scream when being hurt. We don’t like this, so we call it squealing.