The Blue Field (4 page)

I could hardly bear to watch this operation, for he was notoriously clumsy and I was terrified lest he should cut his fingers off. Meanwhile Mr Chorlton, who had recently taken up the study of the social insects, was amusing himself by stirring up with his stick a small ants' nest at the edge of the lawn. As he did so he talked, partly to himself and partly to the world at large, as was his way.

‘The biblical Fascists,' he was saying, ‘who advised us to go to the ant for an example of good behaviour can hardly have realized what a dangerous example social insects set us. Man, when he looks into an anthill, sees the mirror of himself and exclaims with wonder how “civilized” the little creatures are. Why, they establish food stores and have a
system of rationing! They cultivate crops of fungi and keep domestic animals! They are so extremely civilized that they establish slavery and indulge in organized war. Theirs, in fact, is almost exactly the same sort of civilization which recently took us six years to wipe off the face of the earth. It's rather comforting to know that the termites have actually gone a little farther than man along the road to complete regimentation. They are the only inhabitants of this planet who have succeeded in socializing their males.'

He twirled his stick deeper into the nest and leaned forward to watch the busy commotion.

‘If one aberrant ant does anything different from the other ants,' he said, ‘the unsocial insect is immediately slain. There would be no room for William Hart in an ant community.'

My eyes went back to the flax field on the hill and I wondered whether Mr Chorlton was right, that it would lead to a big row. Old William Hart had been in trouble with the War Agricultural Executive Committee ever since it was formed. He possessed more than his fair share of the obstinacy, the rebelliousness, the wildness and the wayward fancy for which crack-brained Brensham is so well known. Because he objected to being told what to do with his own land he had defied the Committee for more than five years. The trouble had started in 1940, about a field which bore the odd name of Little Twittocks. This field was overgrown with teasels, burdocks and small hawthorn bushes, and the WAEC ordered William to clear and cultivate it. This he refused to do, giving the extraordinary reason that it harboured foxes. The argument went on for eighteen months. The Committee, which consisted of successful farmers, was possibly over-enthusiastic and not very tactful, and having tried persuasion without avail they resorted to threats. When threats also failed they sent a bulldozer,
which quickly routed up the hawthorn bushes and pushed them into a pile at the corner of the field. The bulldozer was followed by a tractor, which ploughed Little Twittocks, foxes' earths and all, for the first time in its history. The Committee then sent William a bill for the job, which he refused to pay until he was sued in court. A short armistice followed, and the Committee, having exercised its authority, would have been wise to let well alone. Perhaps, indeed, it wished to do so; but the bureaucratic machine, once set in motion, is beyond the power of ordinary men to stop, like Clotho it spins out the fates of men with ruthless impartiality, and William was caught in the toils of the terrible thread from which there is no escape this side of the grave. Therefore he received in due course a cultivation order imperiously demanding that he should plant Little Twittocks with potatoes under pain of extreme penalties. The obstinate old man took no notice whatsoever, and proceeded to plant it with sunflowers, of all things, the seeds of which he proposed to feed to his chickens. It turned out be a cold and dabbly summer, with little sunshine, and the crop failed; the Committee sent their tractor once again and ploughed it in, which saved William the trouble of doing so himself, and once again he refused to pay the bill until he was taken to court. When planting-time came round he received another order, to plant Little Twittocks with oats. The evidence of his final defiance now blazed on Brensham hillside for all the world to witness.

‘What do you imagine,' I asked Mr Chorlton, ‘the War Ag. will actually
do
about it?'

He shook his head.

‘The war being over,' he said, ‘I
hope
they'll just laugh. But although they have the cheerful faces of ordinary decent men whom we all know, Mr Nixon, Mr Whitehead, Mr Surman, Mr Harcombe, and such-like, they are in fact the
tentacles of an octopus. The inky body of the beast is situated in Whitehall; and it never laughs. I should be extremely unwilling to provoke that octopus, for fear that it should strangle me; which is what I'm afraid it will do to old William. But, by God, what a colour that field is!' he exclaimed again. ‘It's like a piece of the Virgin's snood out of a medieval stained-glass window! If a man wanted to throw down the gauntlet to authority, what a vivid, defiant, challenging gauntlet to choose!'

As a matter of fact I don't think William Hart really meant his field of linseed to be a challenge. I think his real reason for growing the crop was the much more absurd one which Susan the land girl told me when I saw her ploughing the field during the previous autumn and asked her what William was going to plant there.

‘You'd never guess,' she said. ‘We're going to put in linseed.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, the old man says he's sick of sprouts and he wants to brighten the place up a bit. “Let's have some fun, Su,” he said to me. “Let's go in for a splash of colour on Brensham Hill for a change!”'

I believe that was his genuine reason, because he was always one for fun and colour; one might say that the whole of his wild life had been dedicated to fun and colour, jest and laughter and song. ‘What a man!' said Susan, who adored him, as all the land girls, and indeed all women, did; and she started up her tractor again and roared away up the side of the hill.

Now that the affair of Little Twittocks has become a
cause
célèbre
I remember very vividly that November afternoon when I watched Susan ploughing it; for some reason or other it seems to stand at the beginning of all these happenings. I remember it because of a moment of strange beauty which lightened the dark afternoon and because of the joy which I found in watching Susan's craftsmanship.

When I started to walk up the hill the landscape was sad and sodden, the clouds were down on the summit, and a high wind was blowing. A few of Brensham's inevitable sprout leaves drifted drearily about the lane or hung on the hedges. The only sounds were the low moan of the wind in the bare elms and the monotonous churr-churr of the tractor as it crawled to and fro in Little Twittocks.

Then suddenly the flying clouds were torn apart, as if they were sped so fast by the wind that the pursuing cohorts could not catch up with them. The long ragged tear revealed a patch of very pale blue sky low down over the horizon, and a moment later there was a blink of watery sunshine. And now the hedges, that had been till that moment pitchy-black and lifeless, all at once took on a tinge of warm purple-brown; a clump of sallow bushes touched by the alchemist sun turned pinkish-gold; and Little Twittocks, which lay immediately in front of me, changed instantly from sepia to dark red, the colour of old red bricks or a Hereford cow. A flock of gulls fluttered over it like the aftermath of a paper-chase blown about by the wind.

The narrow slanting rays of sunshine, theatrical as a spotlight, picked out the red tractor as it crept like a beetle up the slope, picked out too the dark green jersey of the girl riding the tractor, and made a tiny splash of light on her hair. It was a cheerful and somehow uplifting sight, like a core of warmth and colour even at old winter's chilly heart; and I leaned for a moment on the gate to watch the tractor
crawling round the headland and the gulls sailing like far-off yachts behind the plough.

Having turned the corner at the top of the field, the tractor began to come down the hedgeside towards me. There was a row of apple trees in the hedge, with low-hanging branches which made Susan duck; but she seemed determined to plough the furrow as close to the hedge as possible and she rode the tractor like a jockey, lying almost flat over the steering-wheel when she passed beneath the trees. One didn't need to be a ploughman to be aware of the skill and care implied by those dead-straight furrows and narrow headlands; and somehow it stirred me to think of the small girl on the heavy tractor discovering something that her mother and all the generations of mothers had never known – the ancient pride of Adam in his well-tilled earth.

Like a jockey: surely it was her green jersey and the bright handkerchief tied on her head which gave me that idea. But as she reached the end of the hedgerow and began to turn the corner within a score of yards of me a curious thing happened; the ploughshare must have caught in a root or fouled one of the suckers growing out from the old apple trees; for the tractor suddenly bucked like a horse, its front wheels lifted a good six inches off the ground, then as Susan pulled back the throttle they bumped down on the earth again and I saw Susan rise in her seat as a rider does when his horse plunges.

She reversed, and lifted the plough clear; then opening the throttle she roared past the gate and I had an impression of tousled blonde hair and a flushed excited face from which the momentary alarm was just fading. She saw me, and grinned as if to say ‘That was a near shave!' and indeed if the tractor had come over backwards on top of her she would have been crushed to death by it as many an inept ploughboy, used to his slow-plodding Dobbins, has been
before now. She stopped, and we had our brief conversation, and then she went off full tilt up the hill, with a wave of her hand and a toss of her head, and a lump of earth from the mud-caked wheels came spinning through the air and plopped down at my feet.

What a mere trifle, sometimes, can change a man's mood! As I walked back towards the village I was light-hearted for no better reason than that the sun had shone for a moment on a green jersey and that I'd seen a young girl ploughing as straight a furrow as a man. I paused at the bottom of the lane and looked over my shoulder just as the sunlight was beginning to fade, and the tractor no bigger than a ladybird was crawling along the horizon, churr-churr, churr-churr, etching yet another of those long parallel lines which made the hump-backed field look like an old engraving.

But while I watched, the sunshine was extinguished as dramatically as if someone had pressed a switch, and the light went out of the land. The wind seemed to blow harder as it lashed the laggard clouds to close the narrowing gap; and soon they caught up with the leaders, piling grey on grey, hastening the swift evening. I went on down the road; and with the gale at my back I felt as if I had seven-league boots on. That trivial fragment of experience, the bucking tractor, Susan's alarmed, excited face, her sudden grin, still warmed my heart; and romantically I cherished it.

Susan was one of a score or so of land girls who were accommodated in a big rambling house which had long been empty, next door to the Gables. (‘The Land Girls in their
Hostel, the Young Men at their Gate!' chanted Mr Chorlton with a sigh.) The young men, however, were strongly discouraged and sometimes driven away, by the mournful and harassed-looking woman who was the land girls' janitor and whose unsuitable name was Mrs Merrythought. She was a disillusioned creature with thin sandy hair and the faint beginnings of a moustache, and her life was made wretched by her unceasing preoccupation with the wolfish ways of Men. ‘Ah,
Men!
' she would declare darkly. ‘They're after my poor girls all the time' – as if the girls were a flock of juicy sheep and the village lads sat howling round the hostel with lolling tongues and burning eyes. Because of this preoccupation she had caused the high wall round the garden to be topped with broken glass; and she took such elaborate precautions about locking up at night that on several occasions she locked some of the girls out, with consequences on which it would be idle to speculate. Moreover, because she herself knew so little about men (with the exception of certain legends about their unflagging concupiscence) she gave them credit for a much greater degree of agility, and a much more reckless disregard for danger, than in fact they possess; and she was firmly convinced that they could and would climb the sheer walls of the hostel for the purpose of looking in at the bedroom windows or even – dreadful thought! – crawling through them. She had, therefore, had all the spoutings down the side of the house wrapped round with tufts of barbed wire.

Luckily for her charges, Mrs Merrythought was so concerned with the problem of keeping the young men out that she gave less attention to the task of keeping the girls in; it never occurred to her that the sheep, from time to time, went off in full cry after the fleeing wolves. Nevertheless I am reliably informed that this phenomenon sometimes happened.

The first batch of land girls had arrived in 1939; and since then they had intruded more and more into the accepted pattern of village life, so that they became part of Brensham, and we should have missed them sorely if they had been taken away. One or two of them had been with us from the beginning. These were practically Brenshamites by now; and the newcomers, taking their cue from them, quickly fell into our ways. This was all the more surprising because few of them belonged to our part of England, and many of them came from the cities. Susan had been a manicurist, of all things, before she became a plough-girl. Margie was an East End Cockney, Lisbeth came from Lancashire and talked like Gracie Fields, Betsy with the freckled face belonged to Ayrshire, the one whose demented parents had christened her Wistaria had worked in what she called a gown shop in Putney, and the red-headed Ive was from Birmingham. These were the six whom Mr Chorlton called the Frolick Virgins. The quotation was from Herrick:

Frolick Virgins once these were,
Overloving, living here,

and indeed the innumerable, intertwined and continually fluctuating love-affairs of Susan, Margie, Lisbeth, Betsy, Wistaria and Ive were the talk of the village. These affairs provided a source of unfailing entertainment when they were going well, but at moments of crisis they preyed upon our minds and tattered our nerves, for they were always conducted more or less in public, and if Lisbeth had been jilted or Betsy had stolen Ive's young man the whole of Brensham knew about it, sorrowed and sympathized and took sides. What made these dramas all the more wearing for everybody was a perpetual uncertainty about who was in love with whom; as Mr Chorlton pointed out, in order to
calculate the permutations and combinations of the Frolick Virgins and about a score of young men one would require a slide-rule. For among the six girls there was only one constant, one whose love did not veer and back like the mutable winds or ebb and flow like the tide. Susan loved George Daniels with the single-minded passion of a Juliet, and George Daniels' devotion to her was as steady and unshifting as the Pole Star; and yet, alas, their affair went ill.