Around the Rowan Tree, Day 18

I helped Ronald wherever I could but with my babies all growing up I felt an unexplainable void, a vacuum needing to be filled

Iremembered what Ronald would have done. He would have got any spare man to help from the village, out of the pub. It was the weekend.

I asked Dave Scott if he would do it. Rather to my surprise, he refused. “It’ll be okay. The weather’ll hold,” he said. I didn’t think it would. I went to the village myself and looked into that very much male domain.

“Any volunteers to bring in the hay,” I shouted through the beer-smelling, smoky air. I got several. We got the hay in and the heavens opened.

“Hay’s in safely,” I was able to report to Ronald next day rather to his surprise. The main ordeal was to come, however – the dreaded pea crop.

“Worst tempered crop on the farm,” Ronald would say and he was right. But until I was in the situation myself I hadn’t quite understood what he meant.

Peas in those days were cut in the fields and then brought in in great green trailer loads to the static viners.

These viners were often shared by one or two farmers. We shared ours with our nearest neighbour.

The harvesting of peas more than any other crop was at the mercy of the weather.

July with its wet warm days could bring them on quickly or if it was cool and dry they would take some time to ripen. It was impossible to foretell what it would be.

Tensions

This year the sun shone warmly, interspersed with short showers. The peas ripened quickly and were a good crop.

The trouble with peas was that in one afternoon of sun they could over ripen, become too hard so the factory wouldn’t take them and they would have to be dumped.

This year, to begin with, the pea harvest went well enough but because of the sun and warm weather they were all ripening at once. Our neighbour was in the same boat. Tensions were running high. One field was threatening to be overripe.

“We’ll have to get those cut and in the viner today,” I said to Dave Scott. “It’s not our turn,” I was told. And it wasn’t. I asked our neighbour but his were on the brink also.

What could I do? It was his turn. We lost that field of peas. Half the crop was still to harvest. I wasn’t managing too well. I shouldn’t have told Ronald of the loss but we were so used to telling the truth to one another.

He signed himself out of hospital next day. As with many farmers, the farm was more important than his health. Mixed Feelings of a Farmer’s Wife The burns ran full While the river rose, The sky stayed a sober, sombre grey, Tall trees hunched Over field floods And cars on the road threw clouds of spray. Dull hills hid Behind screens of rain, Bedraggled birds left the watered air. For two dreich days And two dour nights Wet dripping sounds were everywhere. The third day’s sun Shone from deep blue, I saw with joy through my window pane A bright new loch Where white swans sailed But would waterlogged wheat grow again?

With Ronald restored to comparative health, we settled down into a more usual routine. Kathleen went to school.

My small companion wasn’t around so much. In a way I was desolate. This was the first time I hadn’t had a child around my feet for 19 years. 1 knew I must have no more.

Influenced

It wasn’t fair to Ronald. Also my first born, Richard, had left home. Influenced by the stories Ronald had told them about his time in the navy during the war, the places he had seen and what a big and interesting world it was out there, joining the navy had become Richard’s ambition.

Like his father before him he had a certain degree of colour blindness which gave him two choices should he join – either a cook or communicator. Like his father, he chose the latter.

Richard hoped to see the world. Although we hadn’t been able to take them about much, other than places in Scotland, all the children seemed to have this desire to see the world.

Perhaps it was the map of the world always up on the yellow kitchen wall beside the gallery of their own works of art that had something to do with it. They had a game that they played a lot. See who can find...

I didn’t realise at the time that when they flew the nest, they would try to find some of these outlandish places they had first discovered on the map.

After a year at HMS Mercury near Petersfield, from which he had passed out with flying colours, Richard went to sea.

Now I would never be sure where he was and the cod wars were looming.

I still had more than plenty to do. I took over most of the driving and helped Ronald wherever I could but with my babies all growing up I felt an unexplainable void, a vacuum needing to be filled.

One day while cleaning out some drawers long left unattended, I came across an old jotter I had bought in Canada.

I remembered it was in this that I had written the poems when we had first arrived in Canada and were completely isolated on the farm on the prairie. We had no telephone, no radio, no transport and no one to speak to.

Fantastic

Should I open the jotter and read them? Should I stick it in the Aga along with the other rubbish? They would probably be awful, make me cringe.

Curiosity got the better of me and sitting down on the spare bedroom carpet on a warm patch of sunlight coming in from the bay window I tentatively opened the book.

It was like looking through an old photograph album you had forgotten about. The poems brought back to me vividly what I had seen and felt in those lonely days in Canada.

I remembered the urge within me to describe this fantastic new world I had been catapulted into. And I remembered more than that. I remembered my mother saying after listening to a childish verse I had made up: “One day you’ll be a poet, Margaret.”

I’d liked the idea of that. My mother had been a great lover of poetry and I had been brought up on a diet of Byron and Burns, Wordsworth and Tennyson. She could recite screeds of their work. I loved the sounds of the words.

I wrote away when I was young, poetry, small plays, letters to people, and when 15 years old had won a competition on the radio in Aunt Kathleen’s Children’s Hour.

More on Monday.