Harvest home

A combination of mild spring weather, gentle warm rain, long days and dry days have resulted in an early and fruitful harvest after a short and rapid ripening.

The fields of oats are steadily being gathered, the empty stubble soon to be ploughed in and another crop planted for spring. Harvest takes place much earlier here than in Britain.

I love the sight of bales in the fields, it transports me back to that innocent time of childhood in Lincolnshire, where we would make castles and dens of the newly harvested and baled straw (They were rectangular in those days, not round). Long summer evenings, battles using grenades of stubble with hard baked clay to give weight and flight, scratched legs and the sting of the bath before bed, and listening to the shouts of those lucky enough to be left out to play later (My mother was of the old school, bathed and in bed by nine o'clock at the latest).

Before that there was the excitement of watching the combine, seeing rats and rabbits dart from the stalks as their last refuges were mown, and the terriers making short work of them. I wonder where John Bainbridge is? He was a legend for cramming 40 field mice into a pickle jar and letting them out in the school classroom. Miss Lyon didn't half thump him with the chair leg for that one.

Later on in the year, these same fields became our terrain as we went beating for the partridge and pheasant shooters, in 1963 it was worth 12/6 per day or 15s if you were lucky enough to be a flanker, the boy with the red flag either end of the line to keep the line straight, under the terrifying eye of Mr Burt the gamey. In those frozen September mornings you hoped and prayed you were not sent into the shoulder high kale as that meant a wet and cold morning, with blue chapped hands and snot running down your face, doomed to wander for an hour on each reach with the bellowing of the keeper to ensure you didn't stray. Lunch in the back of a trailer of thick veggie soup and hunks of bread, an afternoon of aching leg muscles and the prospect of cycling 5 miles home in the gloaming.

If we were very lucky we would have sausage egg and chips for tea, and a little time to play before bed. No telly in our house, so a book before sleep, or if Dad was home he had maybe remembered to get the Hotspur from Newark. That was a special treat.