An early story by Mary Butts, about a shell-shocked conscript in the first world war, a mismatch both with the army and the normative assumptions of doctors and authorities, sent to recuperate by working on a dairy farm. The crude physicality of milking begins to sicken him—”There was a difference in nature between that winking, pearling flow and the pale decency of a Lyons’ tea jug”—and in the end he contrives to return to his job as a London couturier. Aesthetics, popular culture, gender, culture, nature and artifice, all interrogated and dramatised brilliantly.

First published in The Dial, 71 as ‘Speed the Plow’; reprinted in Speed the Plough and other stories, Chapman and Hall, 1923; in Natalie Blondel (ed.) With and Without Buttons and other stories, Carcanet Press, 1991; and in The Complete Stories, McPherson, 2014