The Blue Field by John Moore Page A

sun, and she obviously prided herself upon her Rational Approach to Life. And indeed she was terribly rational, except about the Russians and the Tories, who provoked her respectively to the most unreasonable transports of love and hate, and about germs, which she viewed with similar sentiments of mistrust and horror to those she entertained for the Conservative Party. When shewas in charge of the crèche at the Village Hall she sprayed the room with so many sorts of disinfectant that it smelt like a chemist’s shop. I sometimes wondered whether her husband ever grew tired of the antiseptic aura which perpetually clung to her, whether he found himself wishing that for a change she would drench herself in scent – the cheapest, the most cloying, even the most tarty scent. But even if he did I doubt if he brought himself to the point of telling her so. She was not the kind of girl to whom one could say such things.
    Her age was about twenty-eight, and she was tall, long-legged, shapely and hygienic-looking, with gentian-blue eyes and reddish-blonde hair cut rather short. Her whole delight, it seemed, lay in organizing other people’s lives. She had organized Mr Halliday into Parliament and poor Pru into the police court and now she threatened cheerfully that if only we could find her a house in the village she would ‘wake up’ our sleepy Women’s Institute, revive our moribund Youth Club, redecorate the Village Hall and get an artist friend to paint bright and modernistic friezes round the walls, and reorganize the Amateur Dramatic Society on what she called a more democratic basis. She also promised to get her husband to ask a Question in Parliament about our sewage system, which was somewhat out of date.
    â€˜They’ll tidy us up,’ sighed Mr Chorlton, shaking his head, ‘and at my age I’ve got a horror of being tidied. For God’s sake let’s bribe the house agents to keep them away!’ But it wasn’t very long, as you shall see, before we needed the help of Mr Halliday in the matter of William Hart.
The Irreconcilable
    The trouble between William and the War Agricultural Executive Committee had begun as long ago as 1940, whenthe Committee ploughed up Little Twittocks and destroyed the foxes’ earths where he loved to watch the vixen playing with her cubs at dusk on summer evenings. It went on, in the form of a long skirmish about weeds and thistles and nettles, for the next three years; and then as I have told you came a period of open warfare about the sunflowers, which William grew on Little Twittocks in flat defiance of a cultivation order to grow potatoes.
    It must be admitted that the WAEC had been, on the whole, pretty patient with William. He was extremely wayward and obstinate, and I suppose to some extent he was even what prim reformers call an irreconcilable. At any rate he was either unable or unwilling to fit himself into a world in which there are a great many regulations and multitudes of forms.
    His attitude to forms was very peculiar indeed. He could write only with difficulty, he could read simple statements only if they were in large print, and in common with some of His Majesty’s Judges he was utterly unable to understand the language which civil servants use when they try to make their orders and regulations clear to the ordinary man. Being a farmer, he naturally received a large number of these forms. They asked him to make a return of all the labourers he employed, ‘differentiating between male and female’. They demanded from time to time a census of his horses, cows, sheep, pigs and poultry. They wanted to know whether his hens suffered from fowl-pest or his blackcurrants from Big Bud, and whether the wire-netting he had applied for was to keep Rabbits (Domestic) in or Rabbits (Wild) out. Pestered as he was with these forms, William at last grew cunning and wary of them, and developed a sort of defensive mechanism against