A TIME TO WONDER AT THE MARVELS OF NATURE
ome, ye thankful people, come; Raise the song of harvest home!” It has always been one of my favourite hymns, and because I am a man of the land it has always had a special resonance. It comes not only at a time of year when the harvest is “safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin” but it is also a kind of marker; summer has officially ended and now the leaves of oak and ash, beech and birch begin to colour up and fall. Autumn, for me, has always been a cleansing process; an acknowledgement of the ending of the growing season and a chance to reflect on successes and failures – to celebrate the former and vow to do better next year when it comes to the latter. The imagery is rich and the memories are clear as crystal, from those days at Sunday school when we would stagger up to the altar with a basket of beetroots or carrots (we were not into marrows in my childhood), to grandad on his allotment, digging up the potatoes and spraying the winter cabbages with soot water. As a churchgoer and a gardener, I am grateful for the opportunity to give thanks, but it is not a sentiment that should be restricted to those of any particular faith. It is a time to marvel at the wonders of nature – wonders we take for granted most of the year. Some folk do not even notice that there is a harvest at all; the veg will be there in the supermarket all the year round, neatly wrapped in cellophane and thoughtfully washed clean of anything in the way of earth. They might, with a bit of luck, come from British soil, but they are just as likely to boast a life spent in Kenya or Spain, Italy or Egypt. I value agriculture wherever it occurs in the world, but supporting our own farmers seems to me to be a top priority, as does educating the young in the ways of the land, especially at harvest time. I don’t want to bang on about how appalling it is that children do not know where their food comes from (even though it is), but just to take a moment to be grateful that at least some of them – a select few – might perhaps go on to become farmers and growers and appreciate the delight of a life spent outdoors. I live in an old farmhouse which is still surrounded by working farmland. This year the field that envelopes our house and garden was sown with wheat. Some years it is barley and occasionally it is oilseed rape which makes my daughter sneeze. It is no use telling her that the pollen is sticky and unlikely to give rise to hay fever; the rich, honeyed scent is, she proves, enough to set her off. But whatever the crop, I take tremendous pleasure in watching its development. This year the bright green spears pushed through the damp, chalky earth in spring and eventually joined together to make a verdant sea that rippled in waves in every summer breeze. The ears pushed up among them in July and then the transformation began – turning the carpet around us from green to gold. Tarmac is unchanging; the fields are not. The harvest came and the combine roared in, sending the rabbits and hares, the field mice and the frogs scuttling for cover. I hope they got away (in spite of the fact that the rabbits chomp at my roses). I am not soft hearted when it comes to rodent control, but I would rather the end came swiftly with a gun rather than in the teeth of the harvester. The bales of straw have been stacked in the field during September – the driest, we are told, since 1910. Now they are being carted under cover to be kept dry and used as bedding for the cattle that will be brought into the barn next door when the weather turns less favourable. Soon the plough will come to turn in the stubble and the cycle will begin again. Our lives are enriched by this yearly cycle, which reminds us of the reality of life: the cycle of nature, rather than of man’s inhumanity to man, which seems, all too often, to make the news. The only drawback is that it does seem to come around with increasing speed each year, and I would not want to claim that it is without its own heartaches borne of bad weather and intractable earth. Yet still we work the land. It is in our blood and our bones. The village church is just opposite our house, and so on the morning of harvest festival we will see small children staggering through its doors under the weight of tins of baked beans and loaves of bread, as well as marrows and pumpkins bigger than any I grew as a child. The hymn itself was written in 1844, but technology and the passing of time cannot erase the sentiments it engenders in me: “Come, ten thousand angels, come; Raise the glorious harvest home.”___