BY JOHN FITZGERALD
(Part three)
(In his teens, Pat from Callan helped to thin a field of turnips, during the war time “Emergency”, and was distracted by girl also working in the field. You can read Part One on the Observer Website)
Taking a break from the thinning, Pat and the girl chatted about their youthful aspirations for a few minutes.
She told him she was doing well at school and hoped to be a teacher. Pat showed her a miniature map he had cut out of the Irish Press newspaper that showed the battle zones of Europe. He gave her a run-down on how the war was going and who seeming to be winning or losing it.
She complimented Pat and told him he knew more about the war than anyone else she knew, young or old. Then the farmer blew a whistle and it was back to work. Pat spent the next four days thinning turnips, but he noticed the bubbly girl didn’t turn up on the third and fourth days.
With the turnips thinned, Pat was assigned later in the week to picking potatoes alongside other teenagers. Half way through harvesting the crop, about twenty giddy children from neighbouring farms reinforced this group.
Some of the older lads resented their presence in the field, but the farmer valued their labour. Being small and energetic, they worked their way quickly along the drills, grabbing the spuds and dropping them into bags tied around their backs.
A lively middle-aged woman with a strong attachment to the Legion of Mary supervised the children and had them all singing holy songs like the Bells of the Angelus and Star of the Sea as they shuffled up and down the field, plucking the eagerly awaited spuds from the fertile ground, their faces covered with clay.
The children received no pay, Pat discovered, instead being rewarded with lemonade and current cake at the farm.
Later in the year, Pat had to help in harvesting a crop of sugar beet on a different farm. This was tough work, as he had to pull the beet out of the ground with his bare hands, performing this task along two drills at a time and creating little piles as he progressed, the sweat oozing from every pore in his body despite the coldness of the day.
When he and his co-workers had completed the pulling, they had to snag the tops off the beet and pile it into a gigantic heap for transport to a sugar factory.
Pat learned afterwards that the pale thin girl in the turnip field was from a village in County Laois. She had been on holidays with friends outside Callan. He never saw or heard of her again until he read fifteen years later in the local newspaper of her death from TB. She had never married.
Seamus O’ Brien, the future newspaper correspondent, did his bit for the farmers too. He was one of a dozen lads that helped to bring in cocks of hay to a farm in the summer of 1940. They had to fork the hay into a huge barn where it would be safe from rainy or stormy weather and in tiptop condition for feeding to livestock in the winter.
All the hay had to be unloaded manually into the barn, with the men and boys pitching it higher and higher until it almost reached the roof of the shed. There were numerous tea breaks for the workers, and Seamus loved the tea, however weak it might be, or however many times the tealeaves had been recycled before he tasted the precious beverage.
He imagined that the sweet-cans that contained it somehow improved the taste, but he conceded in later years that his fervent appreciation of the tea probably had more to do with both its wartime scarcity and the healthy thirst and appetite that the work gave him.
The lovely slices of apple or rhubarb tart or current bread the lads got from the women to go with the tea tasted like Manna from Heaven after a few hours of forking hay. And the older lads, Seamus noticed, had bottles of stout to relieve their thirst, though it only made them thirstier so they had to drink more tea as the day wore on…rations permitting.
(Extract from my book Are We Invaded Yet?)
