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!’

The Ploughgirl

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.

Frolick Virgins

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.