Book review: The Worm Forgives the Plough

By John Stewart Collis

“In the company of flowers we know happiness. In the company of trees, we are able to think.” John Stewart Collis 

John Stewart Collis (born in 1900) was an academic and biography writer (first publishing a biography of George Bernard Shaw in 1925) and became a pioneer of the nature movement in Britain. He had served in the First World War and when he was conscripted the Second World War, he sent family to the US and asked to join the UK Land Army as an agricultural labourer versus taking a desk job. 

Collis immersed himself in his work in an orchard and later as general hoer, ricker and ploughman and the rest of the war restoring a woodland.  His time on the farm came at the end of an era of traditional agricultural life when mechanisation was arriving, but traditional approaches where horses worked alongside the newer tractors.  It was a time of transition from a rural life that had continued relatively unchanged for centuries: a world of manual labour in which almost any job could be accomplished by physical endurance and ingenuity.  

He wrote about his wartime farm life experiences (together with his wide-ranging reflections on the nature) releasing While Following the Plough in 1946 followed up by Down to Earth in 1947. The two stories were first published together as The Worm Forgives the Plough in 1973 and it has since become a timeless classic.

While his account of this period captures the naïve city-dweller's perspective of farming and rural life during this period he meanders across a broad range of farming related subjects - from sketches of the farmer ‘E (…as in E’s coming), his fellow co-workers, the proper way to build a haystack and ruminates on a wide variety of topics broadly anchored around nature such as Contemplation Upon Ants and Meditation while Singling Mangolds.

Though accepting of his own failings, Collis finds real pleasure in the down to earth realities of farming of this era and it is this aspect that really brings this book to life.

The Worm Forgives the Plough gives a unique historical window into a bygone era and is not your typical diary account.  While it can be a bit hard to follow and slow moving or reflective at times it recommended for readers to push on.  While it is arguably an account of the experiences of a novice farm laborer, Collis’s unique perspective makes The Worm Forgives the Plough in part also a book about literature, science and philosophy and is a challenge to place in one category beyond one that it is worth reading.  

@BlackTealBay books rating 7/10