The Power of the Dead by Henry Williamson

The other puffed away across the stubble drawing a trailer upon which was chained an immense plough, consisting of two sets of six staggered steel breasts, one set either side of the beam. The engines weighed twenty tons apiece. Across the field they were connected by a steel-wire cable with a breaking strain of fifty tons, he learned from the driver of the near engine. Five men in all came with the tackle. Beside thetwo drivers were two men to manipulate the ploughs, while the fifth man was in charge of a smaller engine to bring steam coal from the railway Halt, and water from the brook in a heavy iron tank on four wheels.
    He began to understand some of the reasons for the delay: the steam coal had to be specially ordered at the Halt, a truck of ten tons. Each working day of nine hours required a ton of coal and a thousand gallons of water. The rate of ploughing was about an acre and a half per hour: fourteen acres a day. Ninety acres of stubble might be done in a week, providing the weather held. Then there was the Big Wheatfield of hay aftermath, if he could get out the muck from the bullock yard and get it spread in time.
    The work could be done, said the younger Johnson, in a week, but it would mean overtime at the rate of time and a half. Phillip could not face the idea of asking what it would cost.
    Mr. Johnson asked how deep he wanted the field to be ploughed.
    “Well—let me think. We want to get rid of the thistles, and also to break the hard pan, while we’re about it.”
    Phillip was told it would mean turning up a lot of chalk.
    “Won’t that be good? I mean, the hard pan is acid, according to our samples of soil.”
    “Aye, us can do that. ’Twill take a bit longer. Us’ll raise the ploos if they vetch up too much chalk.”
    The two teams of horses were put on muck-carting, and the bailiff hired some out-of-works to spread the heaps on the Big Wheatfield.
    The work was going well; he felt a sense of completeness. It was exhilarating to watch the six ploughs below their shining fellows quivering as though eager to dig into the ground on the return journey, to burst up the weedy litter of the field. So silently, too, below his eyes, as he sat with the two men on a plank tied to the superstructure of the plough. The soil came up in six waves almost silently, yet sometimes whispering as the shares were drawn through layers of gravel, to be followed by a grating changing to a crackle as broken flints came up and tumbled over, to lie upon six fresh new furrows braiding with new hope the poverty of the thin stubble. He wondered how he could re-create the scene in words: the hissing and chuffing of the engine, with its smoothly whirring flywheel to which was attached a drum: the noises of the steel cable in tension, sometimes holding a whippering quarrel with the drum which gathered its protecting coils so tightly.
    The two men riding with him got off, and pulled down the shares for the return journey; the driver pulled his lever, the flywheel ran backwards, releasing the cable. He walked back beside the plough, sometimes breaking into a run, since the pace of ploughing was half as fast as a quick walk. It was wonderful to feel that he was on top of the work. He walked down to the Big Wheatfield, which adjoined the Shakesbury road, feeling freedom that the work there was being done well; returned up the borstal to the Iron Horses, eating his sandwiches under the hedge beside a fire; remaining out of doors until the engine fires were damped down with slack for the night, then down the borstal to the lights of the farmhouse in the vale below, a contented man, to sleep deeply, to awaken with keen anticipation.
    *
    “How lovely,” exclaimed Lucy, standing by the beech hanger one morning towards the end of the week with Uncle John and Phillip. Field below field revealed a unity, each transformed from its shabby littleness to the aspect of a cloth woven of many autumnal hues, with white and near-white predominating.