Sunday 25 July 2010

Harvest

Heat has turned the fields of sharp green to biscuit brown.  The sweet air smells like a bowl of Shredded Wheat.  Driving near Bayfield we saw the first combine harvester this year.  A rabbit was running across its path, living dangerously. No need for a demonic dwarf to spin straw to gold, the sun glinting off the sliced stalks made gleaming treasure of the dry grass.

In the field with two trees and the one behind the red brick cottage, they are harvesting the wheat tonight.  I love the noise and the dust.  It's a live performance of Mad Max.  The brutal power of the machines is exhilarating and disturbing.

We live in the building that used to be the barn for these fields.  I stood and watched the relentless combines go back and forth across the horizon.  Once at this time of year the field would have been full of people.  These empty acres were alive with humour and hard graft.  The whole village would have been out there, bringing home the harvest.  Who were they, my ghost neighbours, the people whose barn we live in now, as cattle did once?  I imagine them, strong hands, rough jokes, dreadful skin, singing to keep the monotonous work in time.  Women and children too.  Schooling gave way to rural rhythms, picking stones, reaping corn.

The wildwoods in Norfolk began to be cleared for farming 11,000 years ago.  For all that time people here were fed by the land they lived on.  But even in cities the call of the season was heard.  Victorian men tramped out of the London to follow seasonal work.  Off-duty soliders helped in the fields.  My family were Eastenders.  In the 1920s Nan went hop-picking in Kent every autumn.  Train-loads of Eastenders did it.  It wasn't mechanised until the 1960s.  In May people cycled 'out to Chingford' and down Bethnal Green Road on spring evenings they came back with their baskets full of bluebells.  Waiting on the pavement, Mum had her happy evidence of the season beyond the streets.

Mum was evacuated to Suffolk from Bethnal Green.  She told me about the landgirls scything round the edge of the field and the horsedrawn binders coming to gather the corn.  That rabbit would have run from its shrinking patch of uncut field to shouting boys waiting with sticks and dogs.  Not long ago this time was the pinnacle of the rural year.  Not long ago, when my parents were young.  Rituals with roots deep in medieval times were woven through their lives.  Pagan Celts dancing at Lughnasa bonfires, the Saxons baking Lammas loaves and blessing the harvest (it means loaf-mass) in churches decked with apples and corn.  The seed and the fruit, symbols of life and death, promise and fulfillment.

Now the people to whom this harvest will matter, who still rely on this field, are not here.  They don't measure their year in rain and sun and the ripening of grass.  The communities that shared ancient knowledge and carried the meaning of the land in their hearts and under their nails, are fractured and gone.  When this wheat is eaten, in a quick sandwich at a desk or a bowl of pasta in front of the telly, who will imagine how, when it was growing in waves rippling like the sea, it gladdened the heart of a woman in Norfolk?

Progress is understood as the improvement of the human condition.  I understand about growing populations and efficient food production.  And I also know that we don't live by bread alone, that there are needs of the spirit as well as the flesh.  These fields still feed the flesh but the rituals of welcome and farewell, regret and resolution are lost.  Apart from the roaring engines, with invisible drivers, these are empty fields.  Tonight I watched the harvest alone, just me and the swallows diving for evening insects.  This crop will feed people I'll never see.  Tonight they are bringing the harvest home.  But there is no laughter, no triumphant song in the air.  Nothing but dust.

3 comments:

  1. Brilliant post Pearly Q! I've asked my literary agent friends to take a look at your blog - you never know... xxx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lovely read. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete