Harvest

Eliza Drummond

Unfortunately it wasn't raining. In fact, it didn't rain all week.

Bumping along the road on the back of a tractor, I felt somewhat nervous about my first day. My dad had made me come 'for some pocket money' and to 'give your mum some peace'. As he was the one driving the tractor, pulling the trailer, there didn't seem much chance of skiving off.

October week, 1985. Most kids were enjoying their school holidays. The teuchter school kids of the Colinsburgh environs were off to pull potatoes for the week. I wasn't exactly unaware of how potatoes grew or where they came from - I'd lived on farms since I was born. However, being asked to scuttle about in a field and pick them up by hand was like jumping in a time machine and turning the clock back twenty years.

Rain would have signalled a stop to the day and a return home to a warm house and daytime telly.

At 7.30am we clambered out in to the field where the foreman did a quick headcount before dividing the field in to bits. A large workforce meant smaller bits and an easy day. If anyone skived off later in the week the extra burden would be felt by us all. Another trailer rumbled past and I was almost knocked over in the scrum to collect empty baskets. I heaved my four tatty (no pun intended) red baskets over to my allocated bit and waited for the tractor to carve up the drills.

I was off to a creaky start. The most exercise I usually undertook was running for the school bus or charging round the tiny village of Kilconquhar on my bike. Now I was stooped over, grabbing at every potato I saw whilst dragging a plastic basket along between my feet. Even nowadays when I see twelve year old girls dressed to the nines I wonder how they would feel if they had to put on secondhand gear with a woolly bobble hat and shuffle along in mud with their bums in the air. There was no trend setting in the potato field but plenty of us could easily have auditioned as backing dancers for Dexys Midnight Runners.

It takes mental as well as physical strength to endure potato harvesting. On day one David cracked first. Like a convict out on the chain gang, David downed tools shortly before piece time and began his long walk home. For a young boy it's fair to say a three mile walk was long enough. His bid for freedom and a day of ITV was shattered by the arrival of his father, who unfortunately also worked at the farm. Just yards from his own front door, David was whisked back to the field in the Massey Ferguson. Needless to say, such a mutiny did not go unnoticed or without further ridicule from all his classmates present.

There was no let up in the work until half past nine. Piece time. Piece time was certainly no peace time. As our whole class was there, any squabbles which had started pre-holiday spilled in to our week away. An argument over a packet of beef crisps even forced one of the adults to stub out their fag and break up the ruckus.

We worked a long day that first day, with the novelty wearing off somewhere between 9.30 and lunchtime. I tried to look for the positives: I was out in the fresh air; the sun was shining; this wasn't school. I was going to be paid for this. My first paid job. This one day started a precedent for my entire working life - wondering how much I would be paid. Every time the tractor dug up more potatoes I knuckled down with the thought of cold hard cash in my mind. My Christmas present money.

The toil continued until lousing time at 4.30 when the final drill was dug and a trailer showed up to drive us back to the farm.

Staggering in the door that night and flopping down on the sofa my mother asked if I'd had a good day. Hell on earth, I wanted to say. 'Oh well, she smiled, 'at least that's £6 you're made so far.' I'd really never had it so good.