My father was the butt of a rustic joke that involved his workmates sending sheaves of corn up the elevator onto the rick faster that he could cope with them. Building a rick of sheaves is something some of you may not have done, and you may not realise how hard it is. Walking round on the soft springy sheaves, using your pike to balance like a tightrope walker; every time a sheaf falls from the elevator you have to catch it on the tines of the pike and twist it around so that it falls into the right place among the other sheaves, where it will be a part of a delicate structure designed to lock together and slope gently outwards, to shed the rain and take a coat of thatch. It is exhausting work, a bit like working on a trampoline, or on the deck of a trawler rising and falling with the waves. My father was as much to blame as his jovial rustic colleagues, really, because he was damned if he would let them beat him, too proud to jump off the rick and get someone else to go up there. As a result he cricked his back and ended up in a plaster cast from his neck to his knee, and eventually went for a lighter job on a fruit farm run by a retired colonel and his wife. The colonel’s wife had been in the Women’s Royal Navy, the ‘Wrens’, and affected a way of standing with her one foot at right angles to the other to let you know she was used to bracing herself against any rough seas that might have hit the office block in Uxbridge or wherever the Wrens worked. (They weren’t allowed on warships until 1993). He, the colonel, was pretty much how you might imagine a retired colonel, only worse, with an aristocratic line in obsolete swearwords. I once saw him come out of the kitchen to hurl across the yard an egg that displeased him, shouting as he did so ‘A murrain on these fucking farmers!’ He was one of many local retired soldiers who came out of the war with enough money to set up fruit farms in the area.
It’s a pleasure to read your lucid account: you describe so clearly these entrenched practices of profiteering and stupidity. Don’t cease from mental fight !
As erudite and thought provoking as always. I come away from your work with a better knowledge and understanding of the situation. Keep up the good work, I share with friends and husband and look forward to your next article
Thank you Deborah. The pain of ecological awareness is easier to bear when I feel I can communicate with like-minded souls.
It’s a pleasure to read your lucid account: you describe so clearly these entrenched practices of profiteering and stupidity. Don’t cease from mental fight !
As erudite and thought provoking as always. I come away from your work with a better knowledge and understanding of the situation. Keep up the good work, I share with friends and husband and look forward to your next article