With the August bank holiday weekend coming up soon, the end of summer looms large ahead and I for one shall be welcoming it with open arms. Just a few years ago at this time of year I would have been sitting in a tent in a field somewhere like North Wales enjoying the outdoor life but for the past two years the traditional holiday month of August has been a washout and it has been just as well to stay at home and get some work done. The real summer of course invariably takes place in June and early July and this year was no exception so why are the school children, parents, students and education workers forced to take their annual rest time in August, the damp chilly fag-end of the season? Well legend has it that it all goes back to a time when the youth of nation were required on the land to help with bringing in the harvest. I was even involved in that particular agricultural tradition myself as a lad, picking up potatoes in the fields of Shortlanesend near Truro. John Richards had a small mixed arable farm, a couple of old Massey Ferguson tractors, a hay barn and two daughters. So labour intensive was the work required at specific times of the year that small armies of child workers were recruited, happy to be exploited for a small pittance per hour in the name of doing some real, grownup work, passing the endless boring long days of summer and earning a bit of pocket money. In order to join in I had to cycle a small pushbike down the hill into town and steeply up the other side for a couple of miles just to get there. Upon arrival at the proper start time there was always a lot of waiting around to be done before you even knew what was happening. Some crucial piece of machinery would be waiting to come back from a neighbouring farm, or the key to the diesel pump shed had gone missing, we were waiting for a field inspection or somesuch holdup. Eventually perhaps just before lunchtime we might actually get out onto the field and do some potato picking. The old red tractor chugged down the length of the field for once row at a time, pulling an attachment called a spinner which was like a big circular rake. It dug through the soil, scooped up the densely grown ripe potatoes and flung them up into the air. What happened to them next? They fell back onto the ground of course, and our job was to bend down and pick them up and put them into buckets. It was back breaking work in the summer sun, hour after hour. The buckets of potatoes were tipped into sacks, then the full sacks tied up with twisted wires and loaded onto a trailer. At the end of a good day, the trailer would be stacked full of half hundred weight sacks of good quality clean potatoes, but only if conditions were perfect. There was one thing that was guaranteed to scupper the whole process and that thing was rain. A little bit of light rain and we would carry on harvesting the potatoes. Never mind if we all got a bit damp, it’s was Cornwall so we were used to that. A sudden shower and we’d take cover hoping it would pass over. If the shower eased up we’d be back out again, even if only for a quarter of an hour before it got worse. But once the serious , persistent rain started up that was it. You can’t harvest potatoes out from muddy fields, at least not with the equipment available to a small family farm in those days. If it rained overnight there would be no work the next morning, then maybe not for the next week if it kept up. Maybe even a fortnight! Eventually in a bad year the potatoes would be left in for so long after they were ready that they’d just rot in the soggy ground, abandoned until it was time to plough them back in again, a breeding ground for blight and other fungal diseases. So there’s nothing new about rainy, washout weeks in August, that’s quite normal and yet so often we feel cheated when the sun doesn’t shine endlessly through the summer season like in Portugal or the Mediterranean. Where does that expectation come from I wonder?
Posted by Andy Roberts August Rain and The Harvest
