The Truth About Harvesting— By One Who Has Suffered

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 258, 21 January 1928, Page 24

The Truth About Harvesting — By One Who Has Suffered

Harvesting had always appealed to me. Although my knowledge of it was confined to Christmas calendars and occasional glimpses of haystacks from the windows of trains, I had built up, in common I suppose with most city dwellers, a vague, but very attractive idea of It in my mind. I imagined it as a delightfully pastoral business, with sunburnt and happy-eyed men in straw hats posing in an artistic tableau before a stack, or tossing wisps of hay hither and thither in leisurely fashion. "Who,” I thought, "would not be a farmer? He w'orks as man was meant to work; not cooped up in one of these rabbit-warrens we call oifices, but breathing the wide air of an Arcadian landscape and perspiring gently and comfortably the while (on the brow alone, tradition seemed to hint.”) In the heat of summer, as I trod the “grey pavements,” my thoughts turned continually to blue skies and golden harvest fields. The very sound of the word brought pictures flocking to my brain, and called up a host of associations. Ruth gleaning in the fields of Boaz, and bearing away her gift of barley: a passage about the harvest mocn in that (to me) most restful of all books of essays, “Dreamthorp”; incongruously, the vicar in “Aren’t We All?” walking off the stage humming "Come Ye Thankful People, Come”: a poem of Alfred Noyes's called. I think, “The Hay-Wain,” in my hopelessly prejudiced opinion the only decent thing he ever wrote; and a great many other odds and ends of memories. Older people, noses close on the scent of temporis acti. told me about the harvest festivals of England, which I imagined as periods of lively junketings. with a sort of super-Christmas feeling in the air, everybody full to the brim of goodwill and good food. I had once attended something of the sort myself, in a place far removed in years and miles from the gay old festivals of England. It was in Norfolk Island, where, tollowing a custom bequeathed them by some visiting American whalers the inhabitants hold an annual Thanksgiving Day, usually in November. The old church at Kingston, once the Government stores, was decked with every possible variety of fruit that could be found on the island. Great sheaves of green maize leaned over and tickled one’s ear during the singing. Grapes, bananas, oranges, and a dozen other fruits lay in bowls, or loose, everywhere; melons, pumpkins, and big kumeras were piled against the ends of the pews. And while the vicar preached

an eloquent sermon on reaping as one sows, or sowing as one reaps (I forget which), I helped myself surreptitiously' to the large basin of blue guavas tthich stood at my elbow. But there was very little hay about it, since little or no haymaking is done on the island; so my notions of the harvesting of grass and grain still remained deliciously vague. This year, having nothing better to do, I decided that a little practical experience might help to strengthen my ideas on the subject, and perhaps put the romantic anil idealised conception, which I had hitherto held, on the firmer basis of reality. . . Always a risky business in affairs of this sort. Though the slopes of Parnassus appear smooth and golden, I harbour a suspicion that, when climbed, they will be found to consist of peat-bogs, with stagnant pools in place of rippling brooks, golden syrup for ambrosia, and, instead of bright-eyed goddesses, black toads squatting on stones. I took train for a far spot where one never hears the soothing noise of tramcars and the musical cries of newspaper boys, and where a straw is placed behind the ear in lieu of the office pen. Arrived there, I hired out my services to a man who wished to build a haystack, and seemed prepared, as far as I was concerned, to try anything once. I wffrned him, in all honesty, that I possessed no previous experience, and that my acquaintance with hay in any shape or form extended no further than the stuff they pack bottles in. But he still seemed willing to employ me. One of my fellow workers, an old hand at it, gave a brief demonstration for my benefit. I stood and watched him with some misgiving. The thing looked suspiciously like work. However, when he had finished his display, with some attention to the finer points, I set to. At this point the first of my pretty illusions, which were soon to be scattered broadcast, disappeared. It appeared that one must not be too leisurely about tossing the wisps of hay on to the stack, as the “builder” must be kept well supplied; and that, seeing that pitchforks and not darning needles were the implements used, it was considered necessary to take more than one wisp at a time. At the end of ten minutes I had come to a full appreciation of one of the basic facts of human existence, summed up very accurately by the person who said, “Things are not always what they seem to he.” After three hours of it practically at a stretch, with the exception of two or three hasty visits to the water can, where I gulped down a quantity of water of roughly the same bulk as Lake Takapuna, work was discontin-

ued for the day. My condition was thuswise. Eight large and painful blisters decorated my delicate citybred hands; I was very hot and very weary, with the promise of stiff muscles in the morning; my hair and clothes contained, at an approximate estimate, a pound to a pound and ahalf of hayseed and fine dust; there appeared to be about an equal quantity in my lungs—this I cannot guarantee, I merely record my impressions; my nose, eyes, ears and throat were thoroughly impregnated with dust, and hay-fever was holding wassail in the bronchial passages. In my heart, my sullen heart, was a strong and fierce determination to burn the next picture of hay-making -that I encountered, be it a Christmas calendar or a Pennell etching. Next day I put in seven hours of it. In the afternoon a wind began to blow, compared with which the wind that rose up in Mr. Chesterton’s “Manalive” was as the gentle sigh of a lovesick maiden. Those who have never tried the experiment of plunging a pitchfork into a bundle of hay the size of a roller-top desk, lifting it high above the head, balancing it in the wind, and slinging it on to a stack, have not yet run through the whole gamut of human emotions, as our popular novelists so frequently put it. I thought of the Shropshire Lad as I wrestled with the hay, my arms aching, my breath coming short. In the morning, in the morning , In the happy field of hay. Oh, they looked at one another By the light of day. In the blue and silver morning On the haycock as they lay , Oh, they looked at one another , And they looked away. Formerly this had brought me splendid visions of rustic love, tihged albeit with the fatalism of Mr. Housman, a fatalism mellowed and honeyed by the veil of poesy. Now my reflections ran along different lines. love on a haystack seemed inevitably a thing of discomfort, which must end not in a marriage, but in a sneeze; a question of small straw working its way down the back of the neck, and beetles clinging to the hair. Sorry conditions for even a pastoral love affair to flourish under. For the first time I began to realise what a great deal that phrase “profane love” might imply. The lunch hour was a welcome season. After a meal of bread and jam and lime-juice we lay on the. grass in the shade, talking about the things men usually talk about when they are together. In the main, racehorses. My particular pal was an adventurous person who in his time had been rabbiter, “hobo,” railway porter, bushman, hawker, harvester, road-mender, carter, slaughterman, and a dozen other things. He told me much about his experiences trapping rabbits, and his description of that animal and the ills to which its flesh is heir made me long for a meal of nice clean tabby cat.

This record of bringing the harvest home may appear a trifle jaundiced. Lest it appear too drab a business, let me hasten to say that my sorry performance was due more than anything to inexperience, and that the farmer, God bless him, looks upon haymaking as one of the least strenuous of his duties. Even though it caused a physical and spiritual crisis in my affairs, I began, after a few days of it, to see its good points. There is, for instance, the honest sweat of hard labour, always a satisfying thing, particularly in retrospect; and the very palpable evidence, in the form of a towering stack of hay, that the work has not been wholly in vain

in a world of vanities and illusions. And then, after the day’s toil is over, there is the ride home, with golden fields beginning to melt into the blue of dusk, and the sun setting bloodred in a smoky sky; the fantails that flit about the horse’s head, and the scuttling or cottontail rabbits across the road; the deserted orchard into which one strays for an idle moment or two, picking raspberries and apples. Finally, the evening meal in the old shack, a smoke before turning into bed, and a dreamless sleep till morning. Altogether not a bad way of spending a week or two.