‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s lukewarm you are today. You’ll have to do a sight better than that if you’re going to make me shiver.’
And now the darkness was diluting into a pale grey morning light, and Gordon Butcher could see the cloudy roof of the sky very low above his head and flying with the wind. Grey-blue the clouds were, flecked here and there with black, a solid mass from horizon to horizon, the whole thing moving with the wind, sliding past above his head like a great grey sheet of metal unrolling. All around him lay the bleak and lonely fen-country of Suffolk, mile upon mile of it that went on for ever.
He pedalled on. He rode through the outskirts of the little town of Mildenhall and headed for the village of West Row where the man called Ford had his place.
He had left his tractor at Ford’s the day before because his next job was to plough up four and a half acres on Thistley Green for Ford. It was not Ford’s land. It is important to remember this, but Ford was the one who had asked him to do the work.
Actually, a farmer called Rolfe owned the four and a half acres.
Rolfe had asked Ford to get it ploughed because Ford, like Gordon Butcher, did ploughing jobs for other men. The difference between Ford and Gordon Butcher was that Ford was somewhat grander. He was a fairly prosperous small-time agricultural engineer who had a nice house and a large yard full of sheds filled with farm implements and machinery. Gordon Butcher had only his one tractor.
On this occasion, however, when Rolfe had asked Ford to plough up his four and a half acres on Thistley Green, Ford was too busy to do the work so he hired Gordon Butcher to do it for him.
There was no one about in Ford’s yard when Butcher rode in. He parked his bike, filled up his tractor with paraffin and petrol, warmed the engine, hitched the plough behind, mounted the high seat and drove out to Thistley Green.
The field was not half a mile away, and around eight-thirty Butcher drove the tractor in through the gate on to the field itself. Thistley Green was maybe a hundred acres all told, with a low hedge running round it. And although it was actually one large field, different parts of it were owned by different men. These separate parts were easy to define because each was cultivated in its own way. Rolfe’s plot of four and a half acres was over to one side near the southern boundary fence. Butcher knew where it was and he drove his tractor round the edge of the field, then inward until he was on the plot.
The plot was barley stubble now, covered with the short and rotting yellow stalks of barley harvested last autumn, and only recently it had been broad-sheared so that now it was ready for the plough.
‘Deep-plough it,’ Ford had said to Butcher the day before. ‘It’s for sugar-beet. Rolfe’s putting sugar-beet in there.’
They only plough about four inches down for barley, but for sugar-beet they plough deep, to ten or twelve inches. A horse-drawn plough can’t plough as deep as that. It was only since motor-tractors came along that the farmers had been able to deep-plough properly. Rolfe’s land had been deep-ploughed for sugar-beet some years before this, but it wasn’t Butcher who had done the ploughing and no doubt the job had been skimped a bit and the ploughman had not gone quite as deep as he should. Had he done so, what was about to happen today would have happened then, and that would have been a different story.
Gordon Butcher began to plough. Up and down the field he went, lowering the plough deeper and deeper each trip until at last it was cutting twelve inches into the ground and turning up a smooth even wave of black earth as it went.
The wind was coming faster now, rushing in from the killer sea, sweeping over the flat Norfolk fields, past Sax-thorpe and Reepham and Honingham and Swaffham and Larling and over the border to Suffolk, to Mildenhall and to Thistley Green where Gordon Butcher sat upright high on the seat of his tractor, driving back and forth over the plot of yellow barley stubble that belonged to Rolfe. Gordon Butcher could smell the sharp crisp smell of snow not far away, he could see the low roof of the sky – no longer flecked with black, but pale and whitish grey – sliding by overhead like a solid sheet of metal unrolling.
‘Well,’ he said, raising his voice above the clatter of the tractor, ‘you are surely fashed at somebody today. What an almighty fuss it is now of blowin’ and whistlin’ and freezin’. Like a woman,’ he added. ‘Just like a woman does sometimes in the evening,’ and he kept his eye upon the line of the furrow, and he smiled.