The Blind Ploughman

'Set my hands upon the plough' the song goes

‘My feet upon the Sod’
(homophobia must have been rife in Victorian England)

‘Turn my eyes toward the East,
And praise be to God!’

And so the ploughman carves his lonely furrow, eyes blind but faith unwavering.

I used to sing this, accompanied by my father on piano.

My father was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, and one of the worst pianists. Self-taught on the church organ, he never quite grasped the concept of ‘touch’. He didn’t do graduated volume – when he struck a key, you really knew about it. Meanwhile, to vent his frustration at the piano's lack of organ pedals, he kept one foot jammed firmly on the loud one.

We only had one copy of the score, so I sang craning over his shoulder, directly in the line of fire. As a result, my voice possesses a volume which could fill the Albert Hall. Though not, alas, with anything nice.

‘God who took-away-my-sight……That my S-O-U-L. Might. SEEEEE!'

We end on a magnificant crescendo, me tremulous with effort, the tendons on my neck bulging, my father red-faced but triumphant as he throws his body at the final notes. My mother, for whose pleasure these peformances are theoretically given, sits poised with a sock on an orange in one hand and a darning needle in the other, waiting with a strained expression for the noise to abate and the ornaments to settle back into their places.

Happy days. I think of them now whenever I see the rich brown corduroy patchwork of a ploughed field amongst the green and gold. Or as I struggle manfully across one, forging a stumbling right-of-way over a sea of sticky mud.

It’s suprising how much soil weighs. A few steps in, and I feel like a concrete-booted Mafia victim. There’s nothing to scrape the mud off your boot with, except more mud, though there seems to be an optimum volume after which no more mud can adhere. Having reached this, one boot occasionally becomes overweighted and stays embedded in the earth, causing me to step out of it unexpectedly, and fall over.

Did the Blind Ploughman man actually plough a straight furrow? His horse was presumably sighted, unless God had decided to give its soul a lucky break as well. Maybe it was a guide-horse, trained specially to tow unsighted agricultural workers in straight lines.

I can’t help preferring the alternative. The happy old codger weaves all over the show, oblivious, an expression of holy bliss on his blind face, his lips parted in song. Meanwhile, friends and neighbours hang around the edge of the field, tactfully waiting to step in and do the job properly after he’s finished, and to rescue the horse before it takes them both straight through a hedge.

There’s a lovely recording of Paul Robeson singing ‘The Blind Ploughman’ at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t_XfcB0ZVg . He lacks my pleasing soprano but makes a fair job of it, considering.