The Blue Field by John Moore Page B

bureaucracy which for a season or two served him very well. He had learned by experience that forms bred like guinea-pigs: the answer to any one question, even if a man could comprehend thequestion and write out the answer, engendered a litter of new questions each more troublesome than the last. Nor was it any use writing in the blank space provided ‘You bloody well find out’; he’d tried that, with disastrous consequences. But these forms, he discovered, could nevertheless be gelded like tom-cats by the simple process of writing NIL all over them. A nice short simple word, and you never heard any more from the clerks in their office if you answered NIL to every question on the form. Having made this discovery, William no longer troubled to read the questions or to ask Pru to read them for him; he merely filled in each of the blank spaces with a large, blotchy and spidery NIL. Later he improved on this method. Instead of NIL he wrote SEE OVER (actually he spelt it SEA OVER) and matched it with a second SEA OVER on the other side of the page. He had thought out this manoeuvre very carefully, and for nearly two years it seemed to work like a charm. But Governments, like the Gods, remember everlastingly; and the time arrived when William’s sins came home to roost like a flock of homing pigeons and he was assailed, not with forms only, but with hosts of angry letters, reply-paid letters, and even threats of prosecution if he failed to provide a true and correct answer to paragraph 5 sub-section 2 (d) within seven days.
    Among this considerable correspondence which Dai Roberts Postman delivered almost daily at William Hart’s farm was a document headed DEFENCE REGULATIONS: CULTIVATION OF LANDS ORDER, 1939. We hereby direct you, it said, to carry out in respect of the lands described in the schedule hereto the works of cultivation specified in the said schedule.
Parish:
Brensham.
No on Ordnance Map
123.
Acres.
71·34. known as Little Twittocks.
Required Cultivation:
to plough and plant with potatoes in a good and husbandlike manner.
    William, I regret to say, took no more notice of it than he took of all the threatening letters. He ploughed the field, it is true; but when the time came for planting he had forgotten all about the cultivation order, and because he was short of food for his hens he took it into his crackpot old head to grow sunflowers. He’d only got enough seed to plant a small part of the field, so he decided to grow maize on the rest. The subsequent wet weather suited neither the maize nor the sunflowers; and the Chairman of the War Agricultural Executive Committee, making an inspection in August, was unable to see them for weeds.
    About this time, to make matters worse, the Committee received a complaint about his bad husbandry from William’s neighbour; or perhaps I should say ‘neighbours’, for the land all round his farm was owned by a Syndicate consisting of some financial gentlemen from London. William’s 150 acres, forming a little island in the middle of their estate, was probably a great nuisance to them; and it was certainly an obstacle to some mysterious plans which they had for future ‘development’. They looked upon it as Ahab from his palace looked upon the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite; and they offered William the worth of it in money, but he refused to sell. And so when the light breezes of summer blew the thistledown from Little Twittocks on to their tidy field over the boundary-hedge, they said to themselves that it was an ill wind which blew nobody any good and instructed their solicitors to write a complaint to the War Agricultural Executive Committee. In due course that letter found its way from desk to desk and office to office and took its proper place in the docket about William Hart which wandered to and fro about the Ministry and now grew bulky and gravid as it ponderously approached gestation.

Part Two
Lords of the Manor
    The