It was exactly 40 years ago this summer that a young land management student from the Lake District found himself doing a summer grain harvest on the Southern Cotswolds, a world away from the hill farming he had been brought up with.
Cotswold Brash isn’t really soil. It’s a mix of organic matter, and rock shards ripped from the Jurassic limestone but a few inches below. It may be very rich and good at growing grain crops, but it is very stony and very thin!
Talking of the 80’s this was the time of increasingly bouffant permed hair for the lady and the original “Gerald” mullet for the gentleman. Bring it back I say! And talking of Clarkson’s Farm brings me nicely round to the harvest. All those mistakes that the big man made during his first harvest working with Kaleb, well that was me and my boss Bob! I couldn’t line the trailer up under the Combine pipe, kept undershooting then overshooting. The air was blue from Bob on the walkie talkie. Finally in utter exasperation as another hundred-weight of barley went over the back of the trailer, he said in his thick West Country burr,
“Oi’ll tell you what we shall do. Oi’ll stop the Combine, have me self a smoke, and even you won’t miss the pipe” before adding, “hopefully”. And that is how we worked, just the two of us, for it was a small family farm. Day after day, up and down the roads of Crudwell, carting back to the farm in the summer of 86.
One day I arrived back at the storage barn with my 10-tonne trailer, tipped it up and next to nothing came out. Somehow, I had not secured the trailer door correctly. I had successfully deposited a layer of winter barley deep and crisp and even, along the A429. I got a severe West Country cussing for that one.
With harvest done, we moved on to cultivations. Bob set me off to plough but carefully selected a field over the hill and away from any road. “I’m not having anyone see the mess you’re going to make, they might think it was me”. The very words spoken by Caleb when he set Clarkson off 35 years later. How I laughed.
Up and down those fields I went, day after day, stopping only to stretch my legs at 11am every morning and listen to Simon Bates Love Song on Radio 1. You remember the theme music don’t you? “Do Do Do Do”……..
After ploughing it was disc harrowing, the worst job ever, bouncing across the unforgiving brash. It gave me piles. Too much information? By September my work was done with only two days off in nearly three months. But I had earned enough to be able to enjoy my final year at college to the limit. In fact, I’ve never been as well off since.
How times change. I came across Bob’s eulogy a couple of years ago. He had sold the farm in the late 1980’s. He probably got sick of awful student labour! Working there taught me a basic premise for life “The harder you work, the luckier you get”. It also made me realise that my future lay back home in Cumbria. How fortunate I was to get back home and spend my working life with farming families, their sheep and their cattle, across the Lake District and the Pennines? I have been blessed.
