all officers , growled George from behind a cow , who had no love of the war Ag , and proceeded to tell me a story far removed from this present ( as most of his stories were ) of how in India , where he had been a private in 1916 , the cow was brought to the householder &apos;s door each morning , and while it was milked consumed the contents of the dustbin . actually this wartime farming of ours on Road Farm was a mixture of ancient and modern . I had a modern rib-roller ; but there was also one made out of a trunk of a crab-apple tree , one hundred and fifty years old , I should think , I found lying at the back of the cart-lodge . and we used that one too , on some tender young beet . it was also a mixed , cosmopolitan , ideological farming . land girls , Germans , Italians , succeeded one another in our fields as the war went on . I had also a young quaker , a pacifist who contradicted everything I said , but he meant well . and George Goforth plodded on , who had once had all this farm to himself , knowledgeable in the handling of tackle , stoical ; getting on best , characteristically , with the least fortunate ; the prisoners , the enemy , lost to their own kindred , far from their own homes . there was a shortage of implements at first on account of the war . scenes come to mind . there was the day when we missed being able to borrow a neighbour &apos;s swath-turner by one minute . it had just been lent to somebody else . it was a day on which hay demanded to be turned . so the tractor which had returned without it was switched off . larks sang : we could hear them suddenly , when the tractor stopped , as we bared our arms for hard work . six acres of swaths to be turned before dewfall , and at four o&apos;clock milking would deplete our team . but it was the longest day . bumblebees disturbed from the swaths by our rakes zigzagged into the air before us . I glanced at the roses in the hedge , at the buds that were more red than pink . someone was saying , there &apos;s one thing , every round gets shorter as we move towards the middle . round and round that field we walked all day . I came to know that hay intimately , every ingredient of it ; clover , rye-grass , cocksfoot , and the occasional pallid corpse of a plant of chicory . I was soon in that state belonging to my former unmechanized farming , of mental stupefaction induced by repetitive manual movements . the jumping teeth of my rake had a life of their own to my eyes , as they snatched at the swath again and again , rolling it over like a small wave , and the hay whispered like surf . there was still plenty of the physical exhaustion of that former farming , owing to the exigencies of the time . I walked behind a pair of horses again , ploughing , before I got delivery of a tractor . but the plough here in east Suffolk was an iron plough , having wheels . it was known as the improved two-horse plough , which reminded me of the name of my old-type of kitchen range at Creams : the new leader . I doubt if I enjoyed any part of my wartime farming so much as ploughing the stubble with Kitty and Boxer , days whose peace was only broken by the sudden roar of an express train going by in the cutting beside the field , which startled me , not the horses ; they had been used to trains since they were foaled here . I , too , got to know the trains : I told the time by them . I also had contract ploughing done for me by the war Ag . a young man came with a crawler tractor and multiple-furrow plough . he told me that his father was a small farmer , and that on Saturday afternoons , having been ploughing with his crawler tractor all the week , he took a pair of horses and ploughed for his father on his small-holding . he enjoyed that : it was his recreation , he said . the field which I ploughed so carefully with the horses , I drilled with wheat by tractor . it was one of the first jobs my new tractor did . and it was a horrible day . fine when we started , drizzle when we had done about two acres , downpour for the rest . the tractor floundered , the drill kept gumming up with mud : it took one man all his time to keep the spouts clear . we ended soaked to the skin , in a field that was churned to a morass . and the wheat - oh those beautiful straight drill-rows of our 1922 Cherry Tree Farm ! how unlike them when the corn showed were those of this first field I drilled of my new farm . but it turned out to be the best crop of wheat I ever grew . I remembered then an old country saying I had heard about wheat : sow in the slop , and reap a good crop . there was also sugar beet , a crop which I had not grown before . a gang of prisoners of war came to hoe them . they hoed up weeds industriously all morning . at midday a pelting shower soaked the ground : the thirty men moved off across the field to their dinner , and as they went , every foot , treading on a hoed-up weed , planted it again in the receiving earth . and the cows . there was the blind cow whose name was Christmas , because she was born on Christmas day . she was not discovered to be blind until one day heaps of manure were placed at intervals for spreading on a pasture that the herd crossed , and Christmas tripped over them . ever since then Christmas preferred to walk beside the hedge , making a detour from gate to gate . how did she know that she was walking beside the hedge ? was it that a hedge has a peculiar quality of scent ? or was there a sixth sense which told her that something was there beside her ? she walked holding her head up and a little sideways , in a listening attitude . in former days it might have been thought that Christmas , being born in an august hour , had met with a blinding light . but the vet said , probably a phosphorous deficiency , and one had to accept that . on the journey home to milking , along the green lane to the farmstead , Christmas walked last . the other cows were purposeful ; knowing dairy cake awaited them . let nothing get in their way : they trotted . but Christmas dawdled in the lane , last , alone , safe from hustling , and enjoyed a feast of her choice . all was safe here ; there were no ditches to fall into , but close on either side tall hedges grew with shoots of many flavours . there were tips of bramble and brier whose thorns were still tender : a wild rose was licked off its stem by that muscular tongue , which encompassed in the same sweep a dozen crab-apple leaves . there was hogweed , ground-ash , sallow . she dragged at a spray of hawthorn , which embushed her head while she tore at it . had there been time enough , there could have been nothing pleasanter than to watch Christmas browsing , while one bore gently on her rump in the act of coaxing her forward . but the milking waited . yet this pushing and this calling her by name seemed only to sweeten her dalliance . she knew that she had nothing to fear from the human presence , by these unhurtful urgings . some movement forward was required of her , and in time she would comply . in the meantime it was like conversation to her , while she enjoyed her banquet of leaves in the grassy lane . she could not have known that there was any such phenomenon as light in the world . therefore , of course , there was no such thing to her as darkness , only hours of a warmth beating down , and then hours of stillness and a cool moisture . the hoot of the owl and the voice of the blackbird perhaps indicated to her what was night and what was day . her chief privation was that she could not follow a patch of shade as it moved with the sun . to her it was an arbitrary and elusive area of coolness . Christmas spent the night in a loose box by herself . she used to walk straight to it from the milking shed , and waited before it , to be steered into it . once inside , she stood chewing the cud and gazing ( you would think ) over the low wall like any other cow . approached from one side , she would turn her head and face you . if you put out your hand she would put up her head to meet it , scenting its approach . sometimes she went into the meadow pond to drink , and having drunk forgot that she had not turned round , and walked on into deeper water . when it was up to her flank she realized that something was wrong , and turned herself about . the other cows did not molest her unless she was in a confined space with them . this situation she learned to avoid . Christmas was a lady of pedigree and a good milker . her calvings she managed for herself , although , of course , she had never seen her calves . on the first occasion there was anxiety and sitting up at night for her . but she calved by herself after all , in an interval between the vigils . there she stood , her calf lying in the straw behind her . she turned to it , lifted her front feet and placed them accurately between its outstretched legs , and lowered her head and licked it dry all over . in her world of darkness she never injured any of her calves : she seemed to have an unerring instinct where to tread . year by year the ploughing and the sowing and the hoeing . the two Italian prisoners lived in an opera act of their own , grand or comic according to their mood of the day . and the quaker , who fancied he had an ear for music , hoed at the farthest possible distance from the Italians in the field , because he could n&apos;t stand their caterwauling , he said . and George Goforth ( whose children were also growing up ) resolutely maintaining of every new machine I bought that it would not work , and proceeding to work it , even as Bill Mould many years back used to do . the type does not change much . and the harvesting , and the Italians building waggon-loads of sheaves , movable stages for their perpetual recitative . and the difficult regulations about land girls not to be set to work beside Italians , when all hands were needed round the threshing machine . the threshing machine beat out the rhythm of the autumn day . straw bales in a long spasmodic caterpillar were pushed from the baler up a slanted ladder and built like blocks of masonry . similarly there had been hay bales . similarly now there were for us school trunks . three times a year I loaded school trunks on to the car and took them to the station , and three times a year loaded them on the car and brought them home from the station . essentially bales of hay are trunks , in shape and weight , packed trunks . in one small field I counted one hundred and ninety-six bales . at six o&apos;clock I said to Marjorie , I &apos;ve loaded and unloaded more school trunks this afternoon than in ten years of school terms , school trunks without handles . bales are obstinate things , ungrippable , liable suddenly to slip one string and then the thing turns into an enormous dissolving accordion in your arms &amp;hellip; . there was the thatching of the new corn stacks , and the quaker showing up suddenly as a better thatcher than George , and not letting the fact be overlooked . master &apos;s tactful handling needed there , in between bouts of getting up steam in the dairy boiler . there was the pleasant solitary task in September of taking a second cut for hay . the days grew shorter , but given fine weather , another crop could still be gathered . 