The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,27

not as a place to which you could transfer (or risk transferring) emotion or hopes—this attitude of the new couple to the thatched house seemed to match the more general new attitude to the land. The land, for the new workers, was merely a thing to be worked. And with their machines they worked it as though they intended to turn all the irregularities of nature into straight lines or graded curves.

One day I saw a heavy, wide roller being pulled by a tractor through a field of young grass, already fairly tall though, and succulent-looking. The roller appeared to be breaking the stalks of the grass and creating, as if spectrally, the effect of a striped, two-toned lawn. What was the point of that? The young man I asked seemed bemused. Perhaps he hadn’t understood what I had said. He mumbled something which I couldn’t understand—all his style breaking down at this moment of speech (and making me think back to the strangled speech, like gruff throat noises, of Jack’s father-in-law: “Dogs? Dogs. Worry pheasants”). Even when what the young man said was made clear to me, it didn’t make sense. The stalks were being crushed, he said, to encourage stronger growth.

Another man said, on another day, that the point of the roller was to press down the “Wiltshire flints” into the ground, so that when the time came the grass could be cut without damage to the cutting machine. “One Wiltshire flint,” he said—and the flints of Wiltshire and of the downs of my daily walk were given an importance and malignity I had never attached to them—“could do thousands of pounds’ worth of damage to one of these machines.”

One new machine in particular I noticed. It made great rolls out of hay, great Swiss rolls of hay, as it were. These rolls, too big to be lifted or unrolled by a man, were manhandled by another impressive machine, a machine with iron grapples like giant scorpion’s tails. A store of these rolls—in two layers, like a store of hay against some epic winter—was established far from the old farm buildings, in an unfenced, flint-rubbled valley off the droveway, just below the hill with the larks and the barrows, and from the top of which you had a sudden, near view of Stonehenge.

So there were three stores of hay at different places: the Swiss rolls here, the golden rectangular-sided bales in the new hay shed at the edge of the old farmyard, and the bales, also rectangular-sided, in the rotting hayrick halfway down the straight stretch of the droveway. What was the point of the Swiss rolls? Was there an advantage over the traditional bales? I never knew until years later, when this section of my life was closed. The bales, tightly banded by the baling machines, had to be broken into by hand and then spread out for cattle. The big rolls had simply to be unrolled; a machine did the job in minutes.

Such refinement! But perhaps the scale—for farming—was wrong. Perhaps time should never be as valuable as that, day after day. Perhaps when routines became as tight as that, they could too easily go awry. One broken link—and human ventures were always liable to error—could throw the entire operation out of true.

Everything the new farm did was big. A very big silage pit was excavated at the bottom of the hill just across the lane from the windbreak, and not far from the cottages. There was only one old-fashioned aspect to that silage pit. It was covered by black plastic sheeting, and the things used to keep the plastic sheeting tight and in place were the things that in my experience had always been used for that purpose: old tires. They were bought in enormous numbers. Scores and scores of them must have been used; and scores and scores of them were about at the bottom of the valley, in the droveway, just across from what used to be Jack’s goose ground.

Those tires, and the deep new silage pit with its braced-up wall of timber planks, and the banks of rubble from the digging for the pit, and the dark-brown silage additive trickling out at the bottom, gave a touch of the rubbish tip to that part of the droveway where, when Jack lived, geese and ducks wandered about.

With the old farm workers the first caution with strangers, the sizing up, was followed by a dumb friendliness, the country sociableness of people who spent hours