When disaster strikes there is really only one thing to do:
you go home, have a cup of tea and bake a chocolate cake! On the Richter scale
of 0 to 10 I suppose, if I was objective, it was a three, maybe a four. It
could have been worst; the polytunnel could have ripped in two and taken off
across the hills, the glass in the greenhouses might have shattered, I might
have lost my ‘inner sanctum’, the garden shed, or the roof of the field shed
could have been damaged exposing hay, straw, and tools to the elements.
At the end of the day all that happened was that I lost
half of my runner beans which in turn took out half of my French beans as they
collapsed under the force of a storm that lashed down the valley, pulled down the
shutters on the hills, and swept wind, rain, and hailstones through the
allotment. It only lasted for a few minutes but the devastation was complete as
the hazel poles supporting the beans; dry and brittle after the heat a month
ago, snapped and yielded to the full brunt of the storm.
The beans had taken two and half months to grow and seconds
to lose their precious hold on the soil which gave them life. I had lost a crop.
As I stood in the middle of the wreckage trying to separate the tangled mass of
leaves, dripping red flowers and broken poles, desperately hoping to save
something from the carnage, I wanted to sit down, give in and weep. Irrational,
illogical response to the situation. I was not going to starve to death. The
local greengrocer does a very nice line in runner beans. So why the despair?
Was it all the wasted effort that had gone into growing them; saving last year’s
seed, sowing them, putting up the poles? Was it knowing that I had ignored my
better half when he had pointed out to me, just as I finished putting in the
support poles, that I had planted them side on to the wind, making them
vulnerable to storms? Or perhaps it was something less tangible.
We have stepped out of the process of growing our food, the
cycle of sowing, growing, and harvesting. We live in a world where everything
is always available regardless of the season. Standing in a brim-full
supermarket we forget that growing food is not easy. The weather, disease,
pests all take their toll on the crops we raise to feed ourselves. We have
forgotten the importance of a harvest and we have forgotten to say thank you
for it.
Our ancestors celebrated the beginning of the harvest
season at the festival of Lammas Tide on the 1st August. It was a
ceremony of gratitude giving thanks to Mother Nature for all her fruits. Its
origins go back to the Celts who called it Lugnasad in honour of Lugh, the sun
god but the Anglo Saxon renamed it half-maesse meaning ‘loaf mass’, the day
when the first new grain was milled and baked into small loaves of bread which
were offered as thanks giving for the first fruits of the harvest.
If you grow things, raise crops, if you are a farmer, a
market gardener, have an allotment or just grow tomatoes in a window box you
step back into that cycle that binds us with our past.
Farming may now be mechanised and high tech but nothing has
changed; the Anglo-Saxon farmer and the agricultural contractor high up in the
cab of his combine harvester are part of something that has turned the world since
the beginning of our time. They both play a game of chance with the god of
weather working day and night if necessary to bring the harvest in. Once upon a
time the corn was cut, stacked in stooks in the field to dry and then loaded
onto carts to be carried to the barn for threshing; today the combine cuts the
corn, swallows the grain and spews out the straw ready to be baled. Once upon a
time the last wagon of corn or ‘hock’ cart would be decorated with flowers and
ribbons in honour of the goddess they believed lived in the corn and the
villagers would all turn out to escort it home. Today, the driver of the combine
turns off the engine, checks his mobile for messages, jumps down from the cab
and drives home alone.
But maybe both the peasant farmer and the combine driver pause
and look back at the empty field as the light fades and evening creeps in from
the corners where the corn once stood and maybe they both smile at what they
have done, what they have achieved in bringing the harvest in.
The peasant may have believed a corn goddess lived in the
crop and the combine driver may have an on-board computer in his cab but they
are both part of the same timeless, endless cycle of sowing and reaping that
turns the earth.
Maybe, whether we grow things to eat or not we all still
carry a thread from the past within us where the loss of a crop did mean hunger
or hardship.
Maybe, this is why I felt so wretched that I had lost my ‘crop’
and maybe why I still have a corn dolly hanging in my window.
No comments:
Post a Comment