BY JOHN FITZGERALD
(Part two)
One Callan man, we’ll call him Pat, recalled his days working on a farm outside the town in the early 1940s. He learned at an early age that carpentry and plastering, at which he later excelled, were less labour intensive than working for farmers. Like almost every young lad in rural Ireland, Pat got his taste of the tough life that the farmers of that era had to endure. They didn’t have a choice.
It was either backbreaking work in the fields or the emigration boat. In the second year of the war, Pat and a few friends headed merrily out of Callan to a farm near Ballyline.
Pat’s father had told him that “thinning” was a great job and that it would make a man of any young fellow. Pat took this to mean that he was in for a pleasant surprise and an enjoyable few days helping his rustic country cousins. He and his mates arrived at the farm full of erroneous notions about farm life, thinking it was a bit of happy-go-lucky harmless fun.
They were quickly disillusioned: The farmer, a powerfully built man with bits of straw hanging from his mouth as he chewed it, along with a juicy chunk of tobacco, ordered Pat and the thirty or so other teenagers, including seven girls, to “get cracking” at the long drills of crops in the fields.
The farmer had several fields that needed attention. In one there were turnips, and it was to this that Pat was assigned. The other fields had sugar beet, and mangolds. It was a cold day, and Pat couldn’t believe that he was required to get down on his hands and knees and start thinning the drills that, to his youthful trusting eyes, seemed to stretch to infinity.
But Pat gritted his teeth and moved slowly along each drill, humming to himself the rebel songs his father and the Christian Brothers had taught him. This kept his mind off the hardship and discomfort he felt as he acquired his first direct experience of agriculture.
Luckily for Pat, an amiable bubbly girl his own age was working her way along a drill parallel to his, and she made frequent gestures of support to him, winking, and occasionally throwing kisses across at him.
The youth blushed, as he thought this a bit cheeky at first, but he then found the courage to return some of the kisses, jokingly, on the light breeze that swept the seemingly endless turnip field.
The same breeze ruffled his own bush of ginger hair, tossing little grains of clay into his face as he progressed up and down the field, thinning furiously.
The girl, he noticed, was not quite as efficient as he was or as fast on her knees, but she was doing her best.
He went slower to avoid being too far ahead of her, and so that she wouldn’t feel inadequate watching his speedier thinning prowess. He reckoned that she might think he was showing off and turn against him.
She was thin and pale, but her eyes were lively and sparkling. He wondered in his innocence if she would marry him in the future, as her friendly gestures, he reasoned, had to mean something.
Meanwhile, the others were groaning and cursing their way through the drills, bewailing their predicament. Pat too was racked by discomfort, but the thought of the wages he would receive- two shillings and four pence per drill- kept his spirits up.
As he approached the end of his allocation of drills, after three days of thinning, the girl stood up briefly and shouted her name over to him. He responded bashfully: “I’m Pat. I like that nice blond hair you have. You’re lovely!”
He couldn’t believe he had said it. The words had escaped his lips before he could recall them.
The girl retorted: “You’re a dab hand at the thinning Pat. What are you going to do with the money?”
Pat thought for a moment and then recited a list of all the things he would like to buy, though he knew he would be handing over most of his wages at home.
During a break in the thinning, a woman entered the field with lemonade and apple pie for the youngsters. Pat had his snack sitting on a stone in front of a ditch, the girl leaning against the half-open gate beside him. He noticed that other boys seemed anxious to catch the girl’s attention, but she was completely ignoring them.
(Extract from my book Are We Invaded Yet?)
To be continued…
