Back-breaking “joy”of the tattie holiday

“‘Noo pick it clean!’ roared the farmer in greeting each dawn.”

TODAY’STEENAGE schoolkids will never know the bliss of it. Deep into the wallowing pit of the autumn term came what seemed like a life-changing fortnight, when books, chalk-dust and the Lochgelly belt were magically whisked away and replaced with a kind of freedom, incorporating chapped hands and dirty fingernails.

Some still refer to the October break as the “tattie howking holiday” but nowadays the howking is mechanised. So the young scholars are denied the doubtful pleasures of backbreaking work rewarded on Friday by a pay packet clinking with half-crowns.

You had to be a rural kid. Some were picked up before dawn by what the farmer optimistically called a “lorry” – a dirtencrusted flatbed trailer hauled by an ancient tractor. So soon after the Second World War all farm machinery was ancient and starved of replacement parts.

For me, the days began with a bike ride on my trusty Raleigh roadster, six miles through the dark to the farm. I was wearing dungarees and Wellington boots, so cycling was not easy. Jeans and trainers were not yet ubiquitous.

There was the added gloss of celebrity to the medieval cluster of grey, stone buildings: the farmer’s tall son kept goal for Stenhousemuir and therefore suffered adulation from several pre-pubescent lassies as he stolidly drove back and forth hauling the “spinner” that spilled the spuds from the loamy earth.

When this tractor broke down, which was not infrequently, the incandescent farmer gave us a loud and impromptu lesson in demotic Scots swearwords from a rich, even bottomless, repertoire as he wrestled with the vehicle’s patched-up innards. We were standing idle, so it was partly our fault.

That’s not to say that the gaffer didn’t look after our well-being. He’d obviously been briefed by the “Education Department” that teenagers shouldn’t be allowed to kneel down on the damp earth. They’d be increasing the chances of arthritis, or rickets, or something.

So any howker who sank to the ground to relieve an aching back was spotted immediately and subjected to a blizzard of epithets, some so rare as to qualify as linguistic collectors’items. These days, they could probably be sold on eBay.

Our “stents”, or personal areas of tattie responsibility, were marked with sticks pulled from the hedgerow and stuck into the earth along the “dreels”. “Noo pick it clean!” roared the farmer in greeting each dawn.

We howked and howked, filling the wire baskets until the German PoW imaginatively christened “Fritz” came along with the onehorse cart to collect the spoils. It was the same cart, with the same driver, who transported us back to the steading as the afternoon waned.

The sweet smell of a tattie field was quite distinctive. It signalled aching backs, a dawn sky that lightened slowly, the blessed “piece break” eating sandwiches and drinking soup, seated on upturned wire baskets. The stink of a rundown tractor’s exhaust as it staggered, coughing, to its task.

That smell is still there if you pass a potato field at this time of year. But the thousands of Scots youngsters who toiled there, mumping, are ghosts in the memory.