Diary not needed for the most vivid of farm memories
Most people have kept a diary of sorts at some time. I kept one briefly at primary school: “Went to school. Came home. Not much happening.” After a month or two of this, when memory tells me there was actually a lot going on at home with several siblings on the farm and at school, these entries stopped.
After a gap of the rest of my school years, when again memory tells me life was full and interesting with its emotional teenage highs and lows, but unrecorded apart from football matches and cricket scores, I had to keep a daily diary of work done for a weekly farming night class.
So did everyone else in the group.
Determined to make a better fist of it this time, regretting all those years lived without daily details, I packed as much information as possible each week in to a small pocket diary.
Make of tractor, type of plough, ploughing depth, shear bolts snapped, diesel used, soil condition, it was all there in detail for the lecturer and others in the group.
The lad I sat next to took a simpler approach. For one week every daily entry simply read: “Muck spreading.”
Looking back I suspect the lecturer and the others were happy with that. It was brief, to the point, and we all knew what it meant.
I could have made my entries even more succinct than his by noting for each day: “Ploughing.”
Memory could supply the rest that only mattered to me of seven o clock starts on frosty mornings, the smell of diesel and Gold Flake cigarettes – distinctive yellow packet with “Honeydew” misleadingly written on it, because doing a man’s job meant starting to smoke – taking pride in keeping the furrows straight as the winter sun came up, wearing an ex-army greatcoat, mitts cut from old socks, feet freezing in heavy-duty, heavily-studded inflexible leather boots, wondering when I could attack my cold fried egg sandwich without leaving too big a gap between it and dinner time.
That’s the thing about diaries, what to put in and what to leave out. I’ve long forgotten most details of that spell ploughing the Baldrons apart from the tractor being an old International, no memory of the model, and a two-furrow reversible Bomford plough with a peculiar, and unpredictable, chain mechanism to turn it over.
But the unwritten memory of those sharp, frosty mornings and the enjoyment of a cold fried egg sandwich with hot tea from a flask with a cork stopper during my first working year on the farm, as opposed to years of holiday work, is fresh.
The same is true of many other events. The time we combined 36 hours out of 40 in a gale as what looked a tonne an acre of wheat was shaking to the ground.
Bringing the last load of barley out of a field on a splendid moonlit night after a satisfying day and the tractor running out of diesel.
The first batch of calves we reared in our new, second-hand, pens.
A sow producing a litter of 18, all alive and healthy and squalling to get at milk. The first time we drilled 49 acres in a day and couldn’t manage to talk it up to 50. The time I misjudged my grip and went in to the dipper with an Oxford tup.
The time I misjudged opening an internal gate on a livestock lorry and found myself with eight Friesian bulls between me and the exit.
All recorded as I became an inveterate, if prosaic, diarist, managing at the end of every day to note what had happened. I’ve kept it up for almost 45 years. But now after ten weeks of lockdown – “Got up. Had breakfast. Not much happening” – I realise that apart from occasionally checking details, I don’t need a diary for the most vivid memories. The sad thing is that like a jogging obsessive I can’t give up recording the daily trivia.
Old-time copytakers on newspapers typing wearily as a journalist dictated a livestock sale or show report would famously ask: “Is there much more of this?”
As far as my diary keeping goes, I’m afraid so.