The Blue Field Read Online Free PDF Page B

plant Little Twittocks with oats. The evidence of his final defiance now blazed on Brensham hillside for all the world to witness.
    â€˜What do you imagine,’ I asked Mr Chorlton, ‘the War Ag. will actually
do
about it?’
    He shook his head.
    â€˜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 thetentacles 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.
    â€˜You’d never guess,’ she said. ‘We’re going to put in linseed.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜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