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Peasant England was still in existence in remote parts of Britain when war broke out in 1939. It is worth asking in what circumstances peasant life tends to preserve peace. Mahatma Gandhi had a vision of an ideal life for villagers in India that would preserve peace and make war an anachronism. He assumed that the care of one's own land, crops, and livestock would overcome the ‘bellicity’ of industrial countries. Nowadays the question might be asked, ‘Is this process of overcoming bellicity, the influence of fresher food and exercise?’ Beyond the food and exercise there is a deep feeling of satisfaction at being even partly self-sufficient. I well remember towards the end of harvest time when a field of oats and barley was being cut and the rabbits were gathered in the middle, catching one with my hands and proudly bearing it home as a welcome variation in our otherwise vegetarian diet. We were hungry but not starving at the time and those farm labourers, who were able to do so, liked to supplement their rations one way or another. A farm labourer by the name of Archie is a good example of how difficult things were for people in peasant England at this time. He was so short in stature that he would stand near enough to the auctioneer to bid for piglets and did so by secretly stepping on the auctioneer's toes. Archie had the sympathy of others because he had such a large family to feed in a time when there was so little food.
Small farmers and labourers tended to overlap. In the thirties before the war a Canon of the cathedral at St. David's walked into our holiday camp with a story to tell. He had been walking along

the coast that morning and stopped for a chat with a man trimming a hedge. He asked him who owned the fields where he was working and was intrigued by his reply that he could not properly say. 'It's like this,' he replied, 'it used to belong to a farmer but when bad times came he didn't have enough to pay me, he said that he was sorry, but that is how it is.' 'How would it be,' the labourer replied, 'if you paid me what you could and if I took the rest in land?' 'That's alright with me,' answered the farmer. Bad times continued and one day the labourer said, 'Look, I own more than half the farm now, but there's no need to worry, I'll take you on to work for me on the same terms. The farm has changed hands several times, and who the farm belongs to now, I can't properly say.' On that farm, conflict and unemployment were soundly defeated. Maybe the moral of the story is that if there is trust between people many problems can be solved. It is easier to trust people who are well-known for their honesty, than it is to trust strangers across national and cultural frontiers. Otherwise, peacemaking would not be as difficult as it is. Every time someone honours a promise and rejects corruption, trust increases like some kind of social capital. Parents and teachers who practice what they preach produce and encourage the development of this social capital.
As the war approached, feeling that I would be dismissed from school on the grounds of being a conscientious objector, I wrote to the husband of one of my cousins who ran a farm, to find out if I would be welcome to come and work there. It was a five hundred acre farm with pigs, poultry, and mixed crops and so there would be a variety of work to learn. It was called Whalley Farm, and the farmer wrote saying that he would be delighted for me to come, as a consequence we became great friends. At Whalley Farm I met people and worked with some of them drawn from families who had small farms of their own or worked as farm labourers and both might be held to be coming from peasant stock, though some might have claimed to be yeomen farmers. They retained attitudes and practices, which belonged to earlier times. The ploughman of Whalley farm was partly Gypsy and lived in what was known locally as Bug Hut, several fields away from the nearest dwelling, with no electricity and only a single tap. One local peasant from the village

was a builder and was known as ‘Mr. Nigh Enough,’ because he didn’t work with all due precision, as a consequence he was never given work at the farm because his work wasn’t nigh enough! The peasant’s humour attached itself to people in this way; they laughed at the results of my trying my hand at sheep shearing because a sheep shorn by me could be spotted a mile away! They were more impressed with my horse-hoeing the potatoes, which was a skill I seemed adept at despite no previous experience. The rows of potatoes amounted to a hundred and fifteen miles of hard walking, in the field where a Roman tessellated floor has since been found. I wish I had known that it was there at that time; the days would have been even more enjoyable. I also recall that at Whalley Farm I had never had the same work for two weeks in a row, except one winter when carting manure to the fields, and even then I was regarded as particularly lucky to be able to draw on the heat of the manure heap to keep my feet warm.
The peasant’s life was full of ritual for example; May 10th was the right day for the cows to go out to the fields, though the new grass-seed mixtures led to earlier grazing. There was a good date for tailing the lambs and for shearing the sheep. The farmer James Rowe was a very gifted farm manager who made the most of his work-people, and I suspect that he sometimes gave way to their opinions. The ritual found a place in the thoughts and language of these people. The last sheaf of corn to be unloaded in a day might be greeted with ‘That's the one we've been looking for’ and a man would be described as ‘Old so and so is alright, but see you don't get his braces twisted.' Jack the foreman of Whalley farm, kept the workshop and was much respected for his many skills. His two brothers won prizes for ploughing and shooting and Jack himself when mending a fence in the least visited field on the farm remarked to me, ‘A botched job won't do. You never know who might come by.’ When a forester was teaching four of us how to bind up some hazel for pea-sticks, Jack learned the knack much more quickly than the rest of us. 'nigh enough,' was not good enough for him.
The use of dialect was fascinating, often I could not understand what was being said: ‘Make some yelms out of that straw’ seemed to Jack an obvious request, but I had to ask for an explanation. ‘Get all the straw lying the same way, he added. ‘Coign’ meaning corner

was easier to guess, and I picked up 'teg' from its context, as meaning a yearling sheep. I would have liked to have learned to speak with a thick Gloucestershire accent, but my ear is not good enough. Sometimes I felt as though I was nearest to the secrets of the peasants when I savoured their proverbs. I began making a collection of books of proverbs from different cultures such as China and Russia, in the hope of finding in them some pointers for peacemakers, and peacekeepers. Proverbs being a ritual of thinking, and being a powerful influence on behaviour, should be known and used by mediators to show that there is a basis in their own culture for reaching an end to violence, hatred and discord in general.

Here are some thoughts about proverbs:

A proverb is to speech what salt is to food.
A proverb is the wisdom of many but the wit of one (who spots how to apply it).
Patch grief with proverbs (which satisfy by the pleasure of matching them).
An argument may be clinched by a proverb.

And here are some proverbs to savour and relish:

A drink is shorter than a story. (e.g. for patching a dispute).
Time is a good story-teller (A story is improved each time it's told. Beware!)
The trotting horse can't hear the story-teller. (Settle down first.)
To ask well is to know much. (i.e., good questioners are better than know-it-alls)
We look at others with our front eyes (i.e. clearly) but we see ourselves with eyes at the back (with bias).
A lie may seem to be wise, but truth is wisdom itself.
Not to know is bad, not to wish to know is worse.
Experience is the looking-glass of the intellect.
Knowledge is a wild thing and must be hunted before it can be tamed (i.e. made your own).
Doubt is the key to knowledge.
The best fighting is against oneself (i.e. to counter one’s own prejudices and anger).
No one gets ahead of the cock.

Advise no one to marry or go to war. (They will complain about your advice).
Every new thing has its special delight.
One who is accustomed to kicks, will never listen to reason.
An ass cannot be made into a horse by beating.
Who travels alone tells lies.
An ant in a cup (i.e. can’t get out).
Go a mile to see a sick man, go two miles to make peace between two people, and go three miles to visit a friend.
Farming, writing letters, worship and the tightening of your horse's girth, you should do for yourself.

In present times of rapid change, proverbs favour old age and experience too much and yet sometimes the application of a proverb exemplifies lateral thinking as vividly as others justify the status quo.
The people in and around Whalley farm caught the full flavour of the story of the family of the farm further up the valley. They lived with an earth floor in their tiny farmhouse and took a day off each year to do their shopping; on the allotted day the powerful horse was harnessed into the small wagon. The wagon was laden with sacks of corn for grinding, eggs, cheese and bacon might be added to bring in some money for new clothes, boots, salt, sugar, tea and something for a treat, leaving the balance for deals with neighbours and hawkers who came to the door. No one was quite sure when this came to an end, may be it was in the years before the outbreak of the First World War.
Long before that it was said the whole valley had been a sheep-run worked by Cistercian monks, good at producing high quality wool. When I stood in a sacking bale to press down the fleeces as tight as possible, suspended for packing from the rafters of the aged stone barn, the hazy mist of history closed round me. I trampled each fleece into place, to make ready for stitching the big bales, which contained about thirty fleeces in all, knowing that I was, at least temporarily, transformed into ‘something rich and strange.' It belonged more to past centuries or to nursery rhymes handed down from one generation to another.

The war started slowly and broke the tiny world of Whalley apart more quickly when news of the Battle of Britain set tongues wagging. It seemed that even the farming community would now be effected by the devastation of war. ‘Where is Scotland? asked a neighbouring housewife in her naivete. ‘My husband has been sent there. Is it overseas?’ The number of German planes shot down increased day by day, or so it was said at the time, now it is a well know fact that the figures were falsified to boost the morale of the country. The constant question in my mind was about facing up to German officials, as a pacifist should do. Should I organize resistance underground? I had heard that they were especially afraid of pacifists for being potential troublemakers. Was my German good enough to explain my pacifist position in defiance of their threats? If I were tortured how would I manage to conceal the identities of my friends? Such were my constant worries, but I was never put to the test.
It is very hard sixty years later, to remember how it felt to be ignorant of what was to come. It is one of the drawbacks of history and historians that they have difficulty in putting themselves in the shoes of those who were acting in the dark. It is often that those who are wise after the event call people stupid. About this time Hitler was boasting that the Germans were about to finish off the British like wringing a chicken's neck. Winston Churchill, in his radio speech, which followed, commented dramatically ‘Some chicken, and some neck!’ To some extent leaders become leaders because they are optimists and the wise took Churchill and his persistent optimism with a pinch of salt. On the other hand he had more information than the general public. Anyway the fortunes of the war varied, the Battle of Britain in the air was won, so that a German invasion fleet could get no effective air cover, but then came rumours of new weapons, which the Germans hoped to use to make London no longer habitable. From the German point of view they came near to driving the Soviet forces out of Moscow and the support of Japan seemed to be a promise of final victory. These ups and downs throughout the war might have exhausted the strength of many men but Churchill survived to lose an election at the end of the war and demonstrate how to accept the thumbscrews of democracy. I have often wondered whether

he remembered that he had said in a wartime speech 'A great war minister is seldom a great peace minister.' He might have added unless he knows how to resign gracefully, avoiding a military coup, and later returns to power.
These topics were seldom mentioned on the farm either among the workers or in the farmhouse. This may have been because we wished to avoid clashes of view, or it may have been through the sheer hard work, which left no energy for other things beyond the work itself. We were certainly a motley crew. In addition to the eight regulars, there was a mixed bag of conscientious objectors. A skilled carpenter came from London and made a home for himself, his wife, and daughter by putting three shepherd huts on wheels together. His wife, a real Londoner, never settled; one day she surveyed the broad view of the Cotswold Hills to the south, where only a handful of farms were visible, no shops, just woods and fields. She remarked, 'The blitz is nothing to this.' Clearly living in the countryside for her was far more traumatic than living among the falling bombs of London. Her husband, to be sure, was a highly skilled worker, but he never seemed to realize that livestock have to be fed and watered, jobs in the country do not necessarily finish as they do in the city, on the tick of five. He was a trade unionist. Then there was a powerful woman from Vienna, an Olympic discus thrower. Her husband being in politics had arranged to be in India with a climbing expedition when the war began, having sent his wife to safety in Britain. A young Jewish boy George, a refugee from Germany, proved to be a textbook case of adolescence; it was he who distinguished himself when driving one of the chariots, low box-like vehicles, drawn by horses. He took charge of a spirited horse and offered three of us a lift from one of the upper fields down to the farmyard. As soon as we started down the lane after stopping at the gate, the horse increased its speed rapidly. So fast that when reined back by George the one rein broke and having no other means of braking George stepped off the open-ended chariot, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves with a runaway horse galloping home. Two of us swung our legs over the edge of the box to land with a crash into a bed of nettles. There was soon no one left and the horse arrived at its tying-up place at the stone wall of the meal house, almost breaking a shaft as it stopped.

It is an odd quirk of humanity that such minor disasters serve as major topics of conversation for months. The events of the war took second place; no wonder the newspapers make much of disasters, especially those near at hand, to the exclusion of more positive reports. It is good that more positive material is being shown to exist by the quarterly English periodical Positive News. Sometimes there appears to be a conspiracy among journalists and news editors to spread gloom far and wide. The excuse given sometimes is that society is thus forced to face its problems; however facing problems is not enough. In addition, there must be hope and determination to ensure action. ‘When hands are needed, letters and words are useless,’ runs an appropriate proverb.
A more sensational event occurred in the local wood by the farm. The International 10/20 tractor with its spade lugs instead of rubber tyres was being worked as a back up to Jack copsing the hazel. It was in my hands, an inexperienced driver, who did not see the little hazel stump in front of the large stump just beyond. The small one caught the front wheel and forced the large rear wheel to mount the large stump, as the land was sloping down to the stream, this was too much and in slow motion the tractor began to fall on its right side. There was no time to jump clear, but the tractor continued rolling upside down with me leaning backwards, being pressed in the back by the spring seat, with my chest very firmly pressed into the ground. The steering wheel and column, being normally the highest part of the tractor, carried most of the weight. The tractor continued rolling and would have rolled onto its four wheels and continued travelling ahead with me still in its seat. Unfortunately the front axle broke so that it fell back on its left side. Jack hurried up to ‘pick up a dead'un’ as he said, and was astonished to find me not only alive but also unhurt. The farmer took it very well, considering that he had to find a spare part for one of only two tractors, but it remained a topic of conversation for months or years afterwards.
The influx of people new to farming due to the war had an impact on earlier ways of life. There were changes in the labour force of Whalley farm, which also included a Land-girl as the members of the Women's Land Army were called, and her brother an architect. Most of us were conscientious objectors and the farmer being a Quaker was very well disposed towards us, and

skilled at keeping his mixed work force with all our eccentricities working happily together. In general it could be said that the war served a useful purpose in shaking up the population, bringing different sorts of people together and producing a tolerance, which is much needed today. The tolerance was even extended to conscientious objectors, though the cowman did say to me that if it was up to him, he would put me up against a wall and shoot me!
We never had an opportunity to explain our strange views. Difficult, potentially disruptive topics were carefully avoided. This does not necessarily lead to an appreciation of each other's values but it may be an initial step towards that. A country is seldom so united as when it is under attack. I have often wondered whether the nations can ever be united without elaborating the environmental problems, which threaten them, and the opportunities for dealing with them. How can global warming and extravagant consumption come to be seen as dragons or ogres that might overwhelm the human race? Lord William Beveridge, a founder of the Welfare State, created his giants, to sum up his official report on the social services of the future, but now a different team of ogres is needed to unite the country.
Our own personal family life was changing. Our son David had been born in 1940, Bevis in early 1942, and Ruth had to give up cooking for everyone at Whalley Farm to move to Puckham Farm, the two farms were worked together. We adjusted to a quieter and simpler way of life. By this time I had had a serious back injury trying to throw a one-hundred-weight sack of potatoes onto a wagon, which was moving away. Dickie, the horse, was not trained to stand still and wait if he could see any food ahead. The consequence for me was that I spent much of my time in the farm office keeping records. Otherwise I fell down with acute muscular spasms. Eventually I had to go to Oxford for treatment, while working in the Agricultural Economics Research Institute and later at Avoncroft College, Worcestershire on Young Farmers Clubs. Life at Puckham Farm was free of any modern conveniences; a hipbath in front of the kitchen range, one cold tap and yet Ruth managed the household for the two boys. She added to her responsibilities by making Puckham a self-catering Youth Hostel and began preparing to work for the Friends Relief Service, a dream that never came true.

It is very hard to say whether it was the people or the new machinery, which did most to break up the old ways of thinking and feeling. Agricultural machinery has replaced the old ways of working. To begin with we provided a service to local farmers by taking the threshing drum from farm to farm during the winter months. This was always a pleasant social occasion in the breaks for lunch, when local news was exchanged. The remark, which began 'The bomb dropped just as I was half way across my piece of bread and cheese …' came from such lunchtime chat.
The operation could easily occupy half a dozen people; one feeding the machine helped by one pitching him the sheaves of corn from the corn-rick. Down below there might be three for the straw, the chaff, and the grain, with a sixth building the straw into a rick or binding it with a baler. Cheerful teamwork is a blessing for those who often have lonely tasks to do; the coming of the combine harvesters ended it all. They worked neatly and efficiently but I missed the threshing parties. The ploughing, which had once been done by oxen, one furrow at a time, was now done by a caterpillar tractor pulling a six-furrow plough. One machine which was new to me, and which I called the mechanical cow, was the muck-spreader, which carried manure from the manure heaps and spread it on the fields. Patient farm labourers working, often with horses and people for company, were replaced by hurried mechanics driving tractors, subjected to terrible noise and rushing to get their work done.
Does this make for peaceful people in a peaceful world? Are noisy industries competing for a place in a world market one of the causes of war? No one seems to know the answer to this question. Certainly excessive competition and concomitant hurry are taught early in life in schools and colleges, in what appears to be a self-motivating change of culture out of keeping with the culture of peace. It is time for a book to be written on the last of the British peasants.
From time to time I heard of friends and acquaintances in the war. My brother Jan was in Burma on the far side of the Japanese troops. His knowledge of tropical botany helped him and his Indian troops when food supplied by airdrops was scarce. One of my closest friends at school was killed in Italy but

in general it was civilians who suffered most of the casualties during the war years, a fact which made it easier to reconcile pacifism with conscientious objection to military service. At times it became difficult to believe that Nazism could be opposed non-violently; at other times when Dresden was bombed and later atom bombs were used on Japan it seemed that it could not be opposed any other way. In opposing Nazism Britain had become almost as ruthlessly cruel as the Nazis themselves, without any justifiable excuse.
Looking back on these experiences much later I concluded that Tolstoy and others were right in identifying the corrupting influence brought to bear on anyone who holds a position of power as one of the major threats to peace. It is a difficult subject to study because no one can expect to find rulers who have the time to allow a researcher to cross-question them. Moreover autobiographies are bad sources of accurate information.
Shakespeare's inspired guess-work revealed in such plays as Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth gives more understanding of the process of corruption than it gives confidence that all the relevant factors at work are faithfully presented. The words in Macbeth (v.iii. 20) 'Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?' point to the question whether the hunger for power may unbalance the normal personality? William Pitt's father, the Earl of Chatham, in 1770 in the House of Lords, anticipated Lord Elton's famous dictum by stating 'Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.'
In Chatham's lifetime 1705-1778 there came to power in Europe the so-called Enlightened Despots. They might be cited as evidence that power does not necessarily corrupt, but certainly most individuals who achieve power believing that it will not corrupt them, are proved to be wrong; just as it is doubtful whether all the Enlightened Despots would withstand investigations of their so-called enlightenment.
Constitutional Monarchy is based on the assumption that power like muck and money is best when well spread. Democratic prime ministers have to share power with their parliaments, containing their own parties as well as the opposition; they have to keep in mind the opinions of electors, who are waiting to be given the

chance to express them at the forthcoming election. There are also the media, the laws and conventions of the constitution apart from the President and as a last resort the armed forces. It is little wonder that the pressures become so frustrating that the prime ministers by-pass and ignore some of them and then proceed to use illegal forms of influence.
The process by which a politician in a democracy arrives at the premiership by overcoming all the hurdles along the way, weeds out all those who have no hunger or even greed for power and the corruption feeds on itself. Those who achieve power are linked by having to deal with the governments of neighbouring countries, dealings which cannot easily be avoided. The electorates cannot reasonably be blamed for failing to recognise a dangerous lust for power.
A country needs a large number of citizens who are quick to expostulate when this occurs. They have to watch events closely enough to know when laws are being broken, despite the assurances reiterated by the officials of the public relations sections of the prime minister's offices. When democracies become involved in wars, the crises provide strong reasons for extending the powers of the Prime Ministers for the duration of the wars. They perceive more or less clearly that, along with arms firms, the armed forces and secret services, they themselves stand to gain by occasional wars. Margaret Thatcher, in the eyes of her opponents, extended her regime in this way, and learned to use wartime propaganda for her own purposes. Propaganda has become so much more skilful in the course of the twentieth century that it is apt to deceive even those who create it. 'In time of war, truth is the first casualty' is a warning which cannot be repeated too often.
The development of psychology is largely responsible for the lack of truth, though a stronger peace movement could equally turn it to beneficial uses. Already new and better methods of improving research are being devised. One ingenious US researcher, accepting that national power holders were too difficult to approach, decided to study the impact of wielding power among local politicians or more precisely local politicians willing to help him.
On the principle what you sow that you reap, this should be a strong encouragement to those who have to deal with unhappy

violent children, often excluded from school, who become the future bullies among adults. Schools and teachers should be valued, not just according to the exam results, but according to their work showing their affections for social misfits. It may be that identifying present day decision makers for extra attention can be supported by identifying the larger number of possible trouble-making power holders of the future and converting them to accept a culture of peace. So far as I know no one has examined this possibility. There are some significant experiments with violent prisoners. This would side step the discouraging work of trying to convert the whole, or the majority of the population.
Finally corruption by power has been accidentally depicted, and more vividly than is likely to be repeated by the secret tapes made at the White House of President Nixon talking with Secretary of State Kissinger his principal confidant. These tapes form the basis of a play and show the depths to which politicians can descend in their ruthless pursuit of power. When I attended a performance of this play in 1999 I was strongly reminded of the face of the Principal of Saltley when he dictated that letter to me . It reflected the borders of insanity itself. Is it possible that wars are started by men who, at least for a time, have lost touch with sanity?
Either by a lucky chance or as a deliberate policy, teaching using activity methods developed and spread rapidly during the war and provided evidence of its therapeutic value. The children revealed their anxiety in their play and many of us not only believed in what was shown but also in the healing process, which accompanied these revelations. How far this depends on the words or coaching of the teacher it is difficult to say. Both the activities and the coaching of individuals become more difficult in larger classes. It seemed to me that activity methods, measured in terms of progress in reading, writing and arithmetic were judged unfairly on account of the period when they were introduced. The large classes and the children's fears prevented them from experiencing a happy childhood in which creativity and mental health could flourish.
Mental health is a thought-provoking term at a time when genocide is threatened by weapons and by the destruction of the environment. Maybe the human race as a whole is suffering from madness in a race towards self-destruction. The sane people

who should be giving a lead, are disheartened. Most people have such a restricted vision they seem to be not crazy but simply stupid. It was once shown by a research worker that the number people using the same front door to a block of flats was related to the number of violent attacks. Is it possible that the increase in violence per million people is related to the size of the total world population? In the USA it has been found that the larger the towns and cities, the larger the number of police are required per thousand of the population to maintain order.
Do the people involved in making war ever know how to count the cost? It is far greater than the cost of lives, of wounds and the cost of arms. War sets humanity back rather than allowing it to move peacefully and actively towards 'Going to Court Not to War,' which has become essential for human survival. Power must be not so much tamed as sublimated, so that the impetus can be put to good use. Everyone can help set an example in the years 2000 – 2010, the years set aside by the UN for developing the Culture of Peace, by making such an effort for peace.