Illustration: Alex Abadjieva
It was an unprecedented national and international crisis, midway through the last century which prompted John Stewart Collis to turn to the land. The outbreak of the Second World War threw Britain’s food supply network into chaos and uncertainty. A vicious battle raged over supply shipping in the Atlantic, and Britons were extolled to ‘dig for victory’. Gardening became a patriotic duty. We had to replace our historic dependence on overseas imports with domestically grown food, and quickly.
This author’s entry into the world of agricultural labouring was a requested substitute for military service: an opportunity that he relished. A life-long academic, he longed to be engaged in labour that was vital and urgent. His writing is shot through with the conviction that to understand the world, the ivory tower had to be left behind. You had to get your hands dirty: you had to get in amongst it. And what kind of work could be more vital than humanity’s never-ending struggle to feed ourselves? The product of a war’s agricultural labouring was Following the Plough (1946) and Down to Earth (1947). These two parts became The Worm Forgives the Plough, first published as a whole in 1973. My copy was published by Vintage Classics in 2009, with an introduction by Robert MacFarlane, the high priest of the ‘new nature writing’. MacFarlane’s dedication is appropriate: in his first-person emphasis on the personal relationship with nature, Collis foreshadowed many of the key tenets of this burgeoning modern genre.
One phrase captures the book’s character better than anything: “faith is reborn whenever anyone chooses to take a good look at something”. What makes Collis such a joy to read is his talent for making the mundane miraculous; for examining the delicate intricacies of the natural world and shining a light on their processes. And finding within them, that elusive thing that defies consistent naming: spiritual beauty, faith, meaning, truth. He wrote in aphorisms, little fragmented mini-essays on a given subject that held his attention that day. It soon becomes clear that this form suits his overarching philosophy of understanding the whole by first studying the part; and learning the part by seeing it within the whole. His teasing, good-natured navigation of the class barrier between himself and his work mates is done in gentle good humour. This dynamic doesn’t play a dominant role in his writing but I feel it could have filled another book. An Irishman educated at Rugby school and then Balliol College Oxford, Collis hailed from the educated literati - if not by birth, then certainly by education and employment. While his early biographies drew some acclaim, it is for his ecological writing that he is best remembered.
This is a book about the experience, meaning and philosophy of work. The tradition of urban academics and writers who project their ideological fantasies onto ‘the land’ has a long and cringing history: of which I’ve sometimes felt a part. I’m in the fourth year of a Bachelors’ degree in a city (Edinburgh) but my family are farmers, just across the water in Fife. The ability to so easily escape the cerebral, angsty life of a student is a privilege: and one that has often saved me. There is something cleansing and reaffirming in putting down the pen and picking up the spade. There is a creativity in this kind of work, but also a monotony that leaves the mind to fend for itself and plough its own furrow while the hands are otherwise occupied.
What drew me to Collis was his lack of sentimentality: the ability to describe this relationship with work without mystifying ‘land workers’. In fact his style displays an earthy refusal to mystify or exalt any person or ideology: his forays into philosophical introspection and self-indulgence are steadfastly unpolitical. I suspect this tendency helps him to avoid falling into the familiar ideological trap of the ‘nature writer’ through history. As MacFarlane reminds us, “the idea of ‘connection’ leads quickly to ‘belonging’, and ‘belonging’ leads of necessity to ‘exclusion’, and so the chimera of ethnicity based on descent and homeland is summoned”. The barbarism that 20th century political language helped to normalise is absent from his writing; my inner sentimentalist is warmly proud to find something quite English in that.
Collis was unafraid of tackling the big issues. Mechanisation, wages, ‘equality’, the nascent welfare state, collectivisation: his treatment of these issues was always wise, and bears the imprint of his era’s ideological turmoil. A nature writer handling these issues without recourse to drooling over some invented notion of the ‘Saxon peasantry’ is refreshing beyond belief. This is especially true in his treatment of mechanisation. He was writing at the tipping point of an agricultural revolution; post-war, the kind of small family farms that Collis worked were on their way to extinction. Mechanisation and monoculture were beginning to assume their Goliath-like standing in modern agriculture. Despite this, Collis doesn’t look back with misty-eyed nostalgia for the days of sickle-harvesting. The combine harvester is a thing of terrible wonder and beauty: but something to be taken on its own merits, not regarded uncritically.
2020, as much as 1940, is a good time to be asking questions about our relationship with the land. We need an economic model that places far fewer demands on the earth’s natural systems. The majority of our population are alienated not only from natural spaces, but from the origins of their food. These are trends that have been gathering pace for decades (if not centuries) but recent events have lent these questions greater urgency. Coronavirus put terrifying strain on our food supply system: we all remember the carnage of empty supermarket shelves and panic buying in those early days of mass hysteria. Food production has once again become a matter of national urgency. In 2019, the UK produced 55 per cent of the food it consumed. In the global sale of fruit and vegetables, we have a £10 billion trade deficit. During lockdown, farmers became ‘key workers’, and there was immense disruption to the annual flow of 70-80,000 seasonal migrant labourers (mainly from Eastern Europe) that British agriculture relies on. The looming prospect of a ‘No-Deal’ Brexit may be the deciding catalyst.
Our food supply system is inherently bound up with a globalised economy; it is also heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Greater mechanisation requires more oil; the overwhelming prevalence of intensive monocultures means that oil-based fertilisers and pesticides are required just to keep the earth alive. In many parts of our country, soil quality is hanging by a thread. In other parts, lockdown has highlighted the plight of the inner city working class who lack access to natural, green spaces. This is a time to be questioning our relationship with the land. Indeed, as Collis showed us, there is space for an open-minded, civic ecology that engages with lifestyle and work. Connection need not entail exclusivity.