Reading J S Collis’ two books on working on a farm during the war (the second one, 1939-45 – though with the Falklands, Iraq twice, and Afghanistan, and a host of smaller conflicts, the language will surely lose phrases like “the first war” and “the last war” before too long), I was struck by how recent the distant past is. Collis is writing during a war in which my father fought, I was born hardly ten years after the book was published, and yet the picture of the land is utterly alien to me. I have seen nothing like it in England, although I have come across something analogous in the poorer parts of southern Europe and further afield.
While Following the Plough is Collis’ account of working for six years on two farms, one in Sussex, and the other at Tarrant Gunville in Dorset. He had no agricultural experience at all, and did this as a more productive and, as he hoped, a more stimulating, job than serving some military staff job (he was an officer cadet in the Irish Guards in the first (1914-18) war, but hadn’t finished his training when the war ended – so he was at once getting too old for active military service as a subaltern, and entirely without practical military experience. Later, he wrote Down to Earth, about being a forester; this was later published jointly with While Following The Plough as The Worm Forgives The Plough - a quotation from William Blake, but it always makes me think of Kipling:
The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes.
The butterfly upon the road
Preaches contentment to that toad.
The subject matter is very interesting, but his prose style can be very flat, even dead. And he gets amusement out of the most trivial things! So, for example, he is suggesting that the threshing machine being fed by a team of nine human beings, would give a traveller from another planet the wrong impression about who was in charge; then he says that even for us, “if we turned a corner and suddenly came upon such a scene, it would be sufficiently surprising” (well, blow me down, the excitement is mounting fast!). But he can be very penetrating, as when he finds one of the land girls he is working with is “mad about poetry”, and he says:
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.
And he has a melancholic, semi-spiritual streak which comes out, normally in comparisons of the urban and the rural, or of the agricultural and manufacturing worker. But on one occasion, having a solitary lunch under a tree, he gets quite carried away:
I do not think anything in Nature is more mysterious or more effective than a big tree. It is not only that so much proceeds from so little .. but there is something about a great tree. Standing under this one and looking up, with knitted concentration, quite baffled, I got the impression that it emanated – Goodness. It stood firmly like a noble Thought, which, if understood, would save the world.
Richard Ingrams, whose article in Slightly Foxed (Autumn 2008, No 19) inspired me to read While Following The Plough, says of that "it succeeds on two levels: first as a description of farm labour in the days before the combine harvester, and also as an account of one man's discovery of nature and the beauty of the countryside." I agree, and he's certainly worth reading, but he takes a little digesting! He is at his best when plainly observing work on the farm, and the rhythm of daily life. The most notable things are the hours, and the lack of mechanisation.
Almost everything is done by hand or by horse, although there are a few tractors in Dorset, primitive and unreliable - and during the war, short of fuel. So gangs of men and women worked the fields, manhandling ploughs, potatoes and potash, and a thousand other things, working long hard hours, and often not appreciating their surroundings through the harshness of their toil. It is a mistake, he points out, to assume that those who work on the land either want to be there, or that they are intrinisically any happier than factory workers or coal miners. He has an endearingly realistic streak amongst the pictures of the farm and the land around him:
I have no objection whatever to standing on a dunghill. There is no place where I am more content to stand. But for how long? That's the question. The dunghill is ... celebrated by poet, by prophet and by priest. It is numbered amongst the highest riches of the land. I never feel better employed than when dealing with one. ... True. But consider the reality. It is 2 pm. There are three and a half hours to go. There is an icy wind. Also a drizzle. There is no one to talk to, and ... there will be nothing to talk about. ... the dunghill soon ceases to be anything but an object, heavy and clogging.