"The Earth."
A story concerning laziness, denial, and misplaced trust, as a man and wife, unsuccessful in farming, set up their son in keeping hens. The boy is "not right in the head. It was not that he was insane or imbecile or even that he could not read and write and count figures, but only that he was simple, not quite like other people...But somewhere behind the blue eyes, the simple smile and the soft childish hair, simplicity seemed gradually to have become a kind of cunning." He proves surprisingly successful, earning enough money to first buy a neighboring plot of land, and then to buy the land and house long rented by his parents. His parents have failed to look after themselves, placing immense faith in God, and wrongly assume that their son will gratefully repay their many sacrifices on his behalf. He becomes the most successful poultry farmer in the area, marries one of his workers, and when the newlyweds and parents clash, he ruthlessly turns them out, abandoning them to town lodgings.
In its themes of changing ownership and attitudes towards the land, as well as heartless efficiency in the name of progress, the story bears comparison with a number of Bates's works of the thirties, including In View of the Fact That, Day's End, and Spella Ho. Egg-raising features prominently in another story published in the same year, The Loved One. The tale also joins a number of other Bates stories in portraying people with mental handicaps of one kind or another.
In the Atlantic Monthly (January 1940), John O'London's Weekly (March 8, 1940),The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957), H.E. Bates (1975). Reprinted in Seven Masterpiece Stories (London: Fleet, 1948).