He did not leave his cottage straightaway, and as he had often pressed me to look in, I did so one day. His wife, I found, had him well in hand. ‘Don’t speak with your mouth full,’ she said to him, to my embarrassment. She was a regular town person and said how much she missed ‘our street’. The neighbours had ‘got her down proper’ by spying on her and telling things against her to the tradesmen. But his tea was the curious thing. She only allowed him new potatoes and bread.
He said he would let me know where he went when they departed. But he went without a word, no one knew where, for he left no address – on account of bills it was said.
Thus passed Alf from the agricultural scene, a town worker who found that after all land workers do not live luxuriously on ‘the fat of the land’. That idiotic phrase is still heard in war as in peace, and I was glad to see a man, accustomed to the canteen-fed factory life, find out how he liked instead the piece of bread and cheese in the rain by the straw-rick. His departure was pronounced on with a certain glee by the others. He had come to the wrong place, they felt, for a soft job. It is natural for the countryman to enjoy seeing a townsman find the work too much. ‘A counter-jumper’ is a term, often used, carrying considerable contempt. Not that it was used to describe Alf, who did not belong to that class, but they regarded him more or less with amusement.
25 My Own Rick
The rain passed and we continued to parcel up large fields of hay into neat solids. It is very satisfactory to look at a finished field, at the solid ricks in which all the hay is now encompassed, and the ground itself looking like a well-swept floor. (There were no stray bits left on the field at this farm, no waste; even straggling wisps were collected and elaborately added to the rick at the last minute.) When the sun begins to slant after tea, the stacks achieve a wonderfully clear-cut appearance, and seen from a distance cast shadows that seem themselves substantial.
It gave me much pleasure to look at a stack standing in a field, and be able to say to myself – ‘I put that there, or helped to put it there.’ Still more so, very much more so, if I had actually been the rick-builder. And, in truth, Robert did permit me to build one before we had done our fourteen. In a jocular way he had said that he would make me build one, and this had whetted my ambition, and seizing a favourable opportunity, I held him to it. I was extremely lucky. We had done several fields with short hay and a strong wind. I got a field with good long hay and no wind. Robert did not wish me to succeed. But he did not hinder me at all; on the contrary, he helped me in every way, adopting a fatherly manner as the best attitude. The others were anxious that I should succeed in order that Robert would be annoyed. And so, from the ground I received many signs and gestures indicative of the state of my corners and walls, with shouts of ‘harder! harder!’ when I was not making the perpendicular, and ‘not so hard!’ when I was going out too far. The thing in building is to get your walls up straight, which I found easier to understand than to do, since there is a strong psychological feeling against putting the hay out – one always feels it will fall over, not realizing how strongly it will be bound by the hay that goes behind it (for hay binds like brambles, as you find quick enough when you try to take it out). This tendency against the perpendicular is most strong at the corners when it is most necessary to oppose it and be bold. The great thing, I found, was to put two helpings at the corners, and not be faced with the psychologically distressing sight of a sloping margin. However, all went well, and I roofed it in the approved Gothic style. It needed no props – and, believe it who will, ’E was heard to say – ‘One of the best ricks we’ve done.’ It was on the highest level of the field, and so as we went away in the evening when it was getting dark, it looked wonderful, to me, against the sky – all those untidy bundles that I had been dealing with throughout the day now compressed into a pure solid, the pointed roof traced blackly and with geometrical straightness and sharpness against the light. Going away from it, down the sloping field with the others, I tried not to turn my head too often to have a look at it.
These were long days. By the time I had pushed my bicycle back up the hill, it was generally just in time to hear the Nine o’Clock News – news a thousand miles away. It would be eleven o’clock before I got into bed. Here was a real occasion of taking the weight off my feet – which had been on my feet for over fifteen hours – and doing so was a definite sensation, wonderful. Full days; happy days; days free from indulgence, free from choice, free from domesticity, free from dreams, free from lost hours, unrewarded labours, mistaken projects. How many men is each man composed of? How many men am I! It is a far cry from this to Bloomsbury where I lived seven years. A far cry from that field to the British Museum Reading Room in which I passed so many hours in search for truth. Hours ill-spent? – I searched for the truth and did not find it. But if I find it here it is because I sought it there. If now I look upon the common earth and read the Riddle, I had to forge my weapon first, and wait and wander till my hour should come.
One night I woke up at 2 a.m. (I looked at my watch) and moved away the books that I had put on a chair beside my bed; for in forking away the hay I was afraid that I would fork away the books as well, and either lose or damage them. So I piled them together under the chair out of reach both of the falling hay and of my prong. I did this with serious deliberation, being quite awake enough to note the time, but also feeling certain that hay was falling and that I was experiencing some difficulty in not damaging the books; in fact I dared not dig my prong in properly because of them. And sure enough in the morning, when I woke up fully, I found my books piled up under the chair safely out of reach of any hay that might fall.
26 Meditation while Singling Mangolds
The period between haymaking and harvest is rather an uncomfortable one. We are between two worlds, as it were, one dead, the other as yet powerless to be born. Slack off then? Pause in well-doing? Far from it. Now is the time to get down to the remainder of the hoeing before it is too late.
There was certainly still plenty to be done here on fields of kale, swedes, and mangolds. In fact it was only now that we began to single the mangolds. The shoots, sown by drill, come up close together in long lines. They cannot be left like that but must be given room to expand – that is they must be singled. About a foot must be left between each shoot. Thus while hoeing weeds away you also hoe out a vast number of plants – a wholesale destruction which gives one an uneasy feeling, for what good can come of these miserable little shoots you have left at such a great distance from each other? Frequently the shoots grow in pairs, and as it is impossible to use the hoe for separation it is necessary to stoop right down and separate them with your fingers. Thus singling is hoeing multiplied. I have not written enthusiastically about hoeing, though actually at times I have enjoyed it. I cannot remember any time having enjoyed singling mangolds, and as I frequently had to do many hours of this alone, I again began to feel time drag. And again I was shocked at the contrast of my attitude now towards the clock with what it had been in the old days. For I used to think then that all I needed was time to get on with my work, and money so as to be able to do that work. For me the money was time. For the business man time is money. For the hoer money is not time nor is time money; to him time is simply an enemy. And when we go a step further and enter prison, we are confronted with the most terrible phrase known to man – doing time.
Still, while performing jobs of this sort I have come closer to understanding the history of mankind. How easy it is, I said to myself one day, how easy while singling mangolds to understand the rise and fall of civilizations!
How did it all start? Who conceived the town, the city, the metropolis? Into whose mind first sprang the idea of the machine? Who first framed the fabric, turned the wheel of civilization? The countryman, of course. He was the first townsman, the first mechanic, the first industrialist. It was he who dreamt the dream of conquering Nature and of escaping from her. He built London and New York.
He stood on the
field, spade in hand, trying to till the soil. A hard job with only that implement. So he invented a horse-movable spade – the plough. He stood amongst the ripened corn with a sickle. He could improve on that, so he made the scythe; and he went on improving all his devices in his conquest of Nature – he was the first mechanic. And as he toiled in the fields, often covered with mud, or wet, or freezing cold, or his back splitting as he stooped over the mangolds, he began to think how wonderful it would be to get away from this struggle, to escape altogether from Nature. So he devised something more than a village, he built a large number of houses with intervening paths – a town. He went further – he conceived the idea of the Great City. How marvellous it would be, he thought, to make a place so vast in extent that you could not even see the soil, to make the paths therein so smooth and clean that you would not get a speck of dirt on clothes or boots, to see delicate women walking along who did not know the difference between a bangle and a mangold, to have lights turned on by a switch and hot water by a tap, to have shops making a blaze of light in the darkness, to enter glorious buildings in which you would find entertainment and instruction, and great churches like jewels so that the eyes of those who gazed on them grew dim.
Gradually the edifice of civilization was set up – in the image of the countryman’s desire as he stood on the desolate field. But as the years passed and generation succeeded generation the townsman began to forget that he had come from the country, and the countryman that he had made the town. And because the people in the towns were more comfortable and better-looking and with wider interests than those in the country, they began to feel more important and to despise the very people upon whom they relied for three meals every day. And because they felt important and began to look it, the countrymen themselves were impressed and thought them wonderful. As the process went on it was the man in the street, the man in the city, the citizen, who came to be regarded as the only person who counted, while queer derogatory names were found for the men in the fields. The citizens multiplied immensely, became far more powerful than the peasants, and decreed that town wages should be much higher than country wages. Seeing how matters stood, many agriculturists cried ‘Away from the land!’, shook the mud off their boots, and joined the citizens.
But as time went on a strange unease began to afflict the people in the towns. As they walked through the everlasting streets they began to pine for the open fields, for the blessed sun, for the realities and simple joys they had left behind. They began to declare that civilization was rotten at the core and perished at the roots, and that nothing could save it except a great Unindustrial Revolution. Not only citizens, but ‘City Men’ began to say in their cups that their work was a farce and that they would rather ‘keep a pig’. Intellectualists insisted that they were ‘really peasants at heart’. A cry of ‘Back to the Land’ went up, not from those on the land but from those in the towns.
And when at last they returned to the soil from whence they had come, they often found that it was no longer there. Their neglect had brought about such appalling erosion that Gobi and Libyan deserts now confronted their astonished gaze, while in other places whole cities were washed away by rivers swollen with water pouring from despoiled and abandoned forests.
Thus my meditation as I stooped over the mangolds. The same conception had occurred to me forcibly earlier in the year when one evening I suddenly felt a great desire to visit a town and dine in an expensive hotel. Changing my clothes suitably I went in. I found a very nice hotel. So great is the difference between the agricultural world and the world outside – a strange, dream-like, picnic of a world it looks from the field – that I blinkingly looked round at the lounge as if seeing such a place for the first time. The good lighting, the polished floor, the groups of clean and well-dressed amiable-looking people held my attention. I poked round the place, and finding a bathroom, entered it. Overcome by the cleanliness of the room I thought it would be grand to have a bath – and I had one. True, there was no bath-towel, but the bath-mat seemed to me startlingly clean and it would do – and it did very well. It was now time for dinner and I entered the dining-room and sat down. I was greatly taken with the spotless table-cloth, the seven pieces of cutlery (I counted them), the vase with the roses in it, the perfect floor, the panelled walls, the electric candlesticks. The other tables were occupied by miscellaneous people, all looking well set up, pleased, and expectant. Waiters began to come round, dressed in white jackets and black trousers. Four courses were brought to me with great expedition. I examined each plate in turn – very nice, one with a picture of watercress on it. I looked round at the smiling faces of the people, all wearing expressions not seen outside; and at a waiter bending over a group with the deeply knowing and confidential smile of a man who can produce wine. I looked at the foods that were brought to me – some meat, peas, greens, and potatoes. Doubtless they came from the land, but it hardly occurred to me to make the connection, certainly no one else in the room did so: the food simply came – no, not even from the kitchen – from behind the screen from which the waiters, like magicians, emerged again and again. For this, I saw, was a dream place, not subject to reality. If a ploughman, I reflected, were to come into this room suddenly, as such, he would be thrown out, or ‘asked to leave’. And that would be right. I would be the first to cast the first stone at him. It would be an unforgiveable intrusion. For he would have broken the spell, destroyed the film and the fantasy of the agreed illusion, infringed upon the dream mankind has dreamt on the bitter field – this escape from Nature, this shelter from the storm, this palace, this paradise.
The whole thing was so fantastic and delightful, and knowing that a bus would soon be due outside, I kept a firm watch on myself (like a man over-drinking) lest I linger for ever here and become lost to the agricultural world. However, I pulled myself together and went out into the pouring darkness and caught the bus and then took my bicycle for a final part of the journey. I was soon passing our farmyard, which adjoined the road. There it was – deserted, silent, a pocket of gloom, a nonentity of a place, something to pass by. Was it really possible, I asked myself, that this slushy yard, so humble, so lacking in all the props and appointments of Power, was yet the foundation of society? Yet so it was. Upon this the fabric rested, upon this was erected all that glittered and all that shone; and I knew that the lighted palace from which I had come where the Figures paced on the polished floor, and the Magicians emerged with food from behind the screens, could not otherwise exist at all. I got off my bicycle and gazed into the farmyard – at the stable door, the pile of manure, the muddy pool, the old binder in the corner, the oil-cans and sacks, the three wagons and the two carts under the shelter. I peered at these things through the dreary dank of the dripping darkness, with some intensity, as if aware that here only, in this place, and in such guise, could I find the roots of grandeur and the keys of life.
27 A Critical Moment
Most of my hoeing was done in company with others. Working at this job in company is not only better for the labourers but better for the farmer – far more ground is covered by a worker in company with others than if alone. The spirit of competition always enters into it, for no one likes to be left behind if the work is being done in parallelled rows as is usual. Thus the pace is according to the fastest worker. And if just two people are taking a couple of rows there is the same tendency to compete – no one knows why. Once I did this absolutely deliberately. One of ’E’s daughters often came out into the fields, and also imitated her father in every particular. Finding myself on a parallel row with her, I worked during the greater part of a morning at an absurd rate, continually passing her as I went up and down the rows.
Harold, Dick and I did a good deal of hoeing together. ‘Anyway, it’s a bit of a change and break for you,’ I said to Harold. ‘Yes, but the wrong kind of change,’ he replied. All the same he always worked the quickest at this job as at many others. We were working now on a field along which the main track ran.
Hence the approach of the Van was easily seen. When it was discerned approaching, our pace would quicken; not too fast, since that would look bad, too obvious; but appreciably, while we asked ‘Is ’E going to stop?’ If the van stopped then we might expect ’E to alight and come across, look on, make a criticism, and possibly join us. This was always a critical moment when the Van was seen – ‘Will ’E stop, join us, and spoil the morning?’ became the great question. One occasion was rather amusing. Harold, Dick and myself were going along our rows side by side across the field. Our cut reached to about the middle of the field, when normally we would turn about. We were working towards the track when the Van appeared coming up, and then stopped. ’E got out and went over into the next field to speak to Robert, and there he remained for some time. We couldn’t see him, but had to suppose that he could see us. At last he appeared again. Would he now come over to us? But no, he got into the van. But it didn’t start off at once; evidently he was watching us. We were still working towards the track, towards him. We came to the end of our cut. We should now have stopped, picked our new rows and gone back. But Harold said ‘Keep on, don’t stop, keep on; if ’e sees us stop ’e’ll come over, sure thing. Keep on and ’e’ll be off.’ And though we had come to the end of our cut we kept going now on ground which we had already hoed (’E wouldn’t be able to notice this at the distance), and continued keeping on until the crisis passed and ’E got back into the van and did at last b off.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 16
