Sussex
From East Dean, which lies south of the South Downs and north of Goodwood, there is a farm track that slopes through cultivated land towards Singleton Forest. Over a flinty lane and over fields where a farm tractor showed me the way I took my car. Here, far from high roads, was peace and stillness in the warm September sunlight. At a cross track I left my car and walked farther where flowers of devil’s bit scabious raised their bluish purple heads among the pink haulms of tall dead grasses. Overhead passed flocks of plover and starlings, and seagulls circled.
A large half-ploughed field, in shape like a contracted octopus, seemed to be feeling a way among the rising, undulating contours. A tractor plough with four shares was being driven back and forth. After each turn, before starting the next line the ploughman leant back to adjust the draught rope to let the shares sink into the soil in what seemed a caressing and satisfactory manner. I walked to where the plough would be turning. The ploughman, a man of between fifty and sixty with a head reminiscent of Julius Caesar, stopped to knock away the dry earth that stuck to the shares. He told me he had been working on the land for forty years. “A good many changes in that time and not all for the best,” he answered with conviction but without emphasis. Now the word in farming was to get the job done. There was little feeling for the work itself. For himself he would rather walk behind a pair of horses than drive a motor tractor.
