H.E. Bates Companion

Waddo is both a shoemaking stitcher and a thresher who helps the narrator's family at harvest time, bearing much similarity to other superhuman laborers in Bates's works (such as "The Mower"): he swings "a scythe with a masterly and precise beauty that no machine could ever have shown;" at the same time he is enamored of machines that do the "work of scores of men." The July 15, 1938 issue of the Radio Times lists that the story would be read on the BBC by Stephen Jack on July 15, and that it was "written for broadcasting." In John O'London's Weekly (August 5, 1938), The Flying Goat (1939), Under Thirty: an Anthology (London: Rich & Cowan, 1939), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947).