Breaking fresh ground

As he toils behind his rotavator on a March morning, John Lewis-Stempel breathes in the heady scent of turned soil and is cheered by the repetitive call of the chiffchaff that heralds the arrival of spring Illustration by Michael Frith

- John Lewis-Stempel

ONLY a man rotavating. To the front of the machine, through the cobwebby mist, the bare ground around the troughs and racks where the sheep stood eating in the bleak days on the hill; behind the spinning steel blades churned earth, for re-sowing. One view is winter, one is spring. The rotavator hits a subterranean rock, pitches and rolls; the operator, although grip- ping the ox-horn handlebars tight, stumbles among the waves of red earth. A drunken sailor. The engine whines as it works; it is as deafening as conches. Yet, if the rotavator is modern, the tilling of soil is ancient, dating back to time almost beyond measure, when fur-clad humans scraped at the ground with a deer horn. The means change, the practice remains the same.

Gradually, in the warming of the morning, the air in the field top rises, overflowing with scent: the scent of freshly turned dirt. Among the nasal notes of musty wardrobe and rusted iron comes something like baker’s yeast or a baby’s head. The smell of birth. The cruel, curved blades of the rotavator bisect a long pink earthworm, whose ends coil and circle in an ironic flesh imitation of those blades. ‘The cut worm forgives the plough,’ wrote William Blake in Proverbs