大象传媒

When the Treaty of Versailles was signed, ending the war with Germany, I was aged 9. My generation had to pursue our education, school, university, and the first steps in our chosen occupations in between the wars, in which we knew we would be involved. But some of us agreed to resist conscription for military service, some on religious grounds, and some like myself on more general moral objections, that this was a vicious and perverse system, taking civilians into training as killing machines, opposing another mass of civilians similarly trained, to engage in a campaign of destruction, demonstrating the failure of our political leaders to settle their differences in a more peaceful and civilized manner. I shared the general hatred of the Nazi government, but my sense of dilemma led me in a different direction from that of most of my contemporaries, so that when my call-up papers came in the late summer of 1940 I registered as a "conscientious objector", for which I was instantly dismissed from my library job.
I had by this time answered an advertisement from a farmer needing clerical as well as general help. I was taken on by someone not really a farmer, in a very dilapidated farm, where I had company with two other COs. But a neighbouring farmer, with whom I spent the remaining 7 years, bought up the bad farm, but without my companions. My new employer was a man of about my age, trained in an agricultural college, who also welcomed my rather modest clerical abilities. But I now came up against the reaction of the older farm workers, possibly veterans of the first war. It was verbal abuse only, but that was not easy; however I knew I could do nothing about, indeed it was natural.
There was this much to interest me in the work. Although I did not realise how far this was the old-fashioned farm work. It needed horses, and I got used to dealing with a pair of gentle monster shire horses, learning their harnessing and how to back them into the shafts of a cart, and drive them to work in various ways.
I got used to the old ways of harvesting, with a reaper-binder which turned out the tied sheaves, leaving them to be collected by workers and stacked - or stooked - to dry. There followed the carting to a barn, from which they were later pulled out to go through the threshing process. This was a dusty process, in which I often found myself in charge of the corn as it came out in separate classes into sacks of l.1/2cwts. But the additional trouble for me was that the threshing contractor still indulged in the abuse from which I had escaped elsewhere.
Late in the war the farmer employed some Italian POWs, cheerful to work with and apparently without much resentment at their escape from the active warfare. I learned some Italian since they relied on me to tell them the time. I am surprised how little I remember of my 7 years; but that is the nature of the repetitive work. But there are some memorable moments. One is of a pig-killing which I was detailed to help a skilled man with animals, who helped on these occasions though not a member of the staff of the farm. I could not deny that I liked bacon, so had to take part in this grizzly affair. But I was full of admiration at the skill with which Charlie Warner dismembered the flesh of the victim. It was with the same person that the other memorable event occurred, driving a small flock of sheep straight through the centre of Worcester, over the Severn bridge to some meadow on the other side.
I think that my recent experience in a successful college "eight" made me as fit as I was that lessened the strain of my unaccustomed outdoor work. I had one day off in the whole time, due to the extra dust in "bossing" clover.
Old-fashioned also pay - 48/- shillings a week. How did me and my wife manage?
So I was glad to have some help from the County Librarian of Worcestershire in getting a part-time library job. I feel that though I had in fact been "conscripted" it was to a job which helped in a minute degree with the production of food for the population - and for the Italian POWs.

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