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.

Sculthorpe Boulevard

Yesterday we went to a reclaimed timber yard to find floor boards for the holiday cottages. Heavy rain was muscling down all day.  The yard was on a desolate criss cross of tarmac and grass which used to be RAF Sculthorpe.  Lumbering bombers heaved into the sky from here in the Second World War.  Nan always called it 'The Last War'.  If only. Although she meant the war just finished of course, since the Cold War didn't count.  Too sneaky and no street parties.

Skeletons of half-demolished hangers and bunk houses haunted the empty paths.  We drove down one called 'Sculthorpe Blvd'.  It is big, it was the wars that got small.  Two men in acid green jackets were digging clumps of turf up by the side of the road.  By the black mountain of tyres we stopped to ask directions at a snack bar.  The snack bar was a small trailer where a wind-blasted woman was fighting with dirty blue tarpaulin, trying to weigh it down with rocks. She didn't know left from right but we followed her gestures and found the place.    

Enormous posts with sharpened ends, massive beams and piles of planks spiked with metal lay in the mud.  Welcome to the Somme.  We parked in a puddle and pulled Little Three out of her sleep into the gale. In an old hanger two men were cutting wood with giant circular saws.  One of them, in wet wool and a damp beard muttered "Picked a day for it". He might have been building an ark but in the meantime was using a portacabin.  I've run out of contact lenses so I was in my specs.  Useless in the rain, they steamed up when we went inside but I was holding Little Three so I couldn't wipe them.  Through my private fog I peered at floorboards, oak and pine, treated with wax, varnish or left splintery, ripped from derelict buildings.  Lucky Mr P can see and I hope he could tell the difference.  

Little Three examined some pages torn from a lads' mag and glued to the wall.  "A girl!" she shouted. "Girls!"  Someone dreaming of girls in red bikinis had built a Star Wars AT-AT Walker and put it on a filing cabinet.  

The guy in the beard and hat was a nice guy.  His firm had laid the floor of The Wiveton Bell using old boards from some other place. The first time we came to Norfolk The Wiveton Bell was our local for a week.  My feet were standing on those boards when I turned down a second gin and tonic, the first sign that Little Three was already with us, although we didn't know it then.    

We have found some boards at Homebase but think we'll go with these.  Less predictable - they will bring whatever they have at the time.  Inside some pine trees are streaks of sunset pink.  I like that they were cut and planed, laid and trodden and now they have been abandoned we will take them to use again.  We are buying our floors from the Battersea Trees' Home.  Without the bark.