Hop Yard

     “I need a bed and breakfast, and I need a farmer.”

     A brief silence was followed by jeers, cheers, catcalls and lots of laughter.  Almost immediately, the boys at the pub’s main table unanimously nominated one Robert Ward from their midst.  He wasn’t the only farmer at the table.  Quite a few were either farmers or retired farmers.  It turned out that Bob was very recently divorced.  What better candidate to handle such a brazen female?

     The rest of our party, including me, joined the Goodwife in the pub as she explained.  We were Yankees (as if they couldn’t tell from her American accent) touring England, we were tired from a long day of rubbernecking, we needed a place to spend the night, and her husband and brother-in-law wished to visit an English farm.

     The Goodwife and I had gone all over the island via a Brit rail pass, but the tracks don’t go everywhere.  This day we had motored to Stonehenge (Uncle Ricky showed his disdain for things archaeological by referring to it as a big pile of rocks) where we were wretchedly disappointed by being able to get only about thirty yards from the site.  Sightseers are now fenced out due to the ignoramuses who think it necessary to write their name on the stones, or chip off a little piece for their personal collection.  

      It had been a long day and we were looking forward to supper and a place to lay our heads.  We were in a rural rea.  Uncle Ricky and I decided it would be a great idea to visit a farm.  As we pulled up to the pub in the village, Uncle Ricky said to the Goodwife, almost as a dare, “Go in and find us a place to stay tonight and a farm we can visit tomorrow.”

      The Goodwife was up to the dare.  Her explanation to the beery boys completed, we found a table, ordered a brew and eventually a meal.  Robert Ward proved to be up to the task to which his fellows had nominated him.  Our meal nearly complete, he approached our table.  He said the boys had selected the perfect bed and breakfast for us, and he would be happy to give us a tour of his farm on the morrow.

      The perfect bed and breakfast was probably 300 years old, a mile or two from the village.  It was a stone house, a pretty good sized one, two story with an uneven stone stairway.  The most memorable feature was the stone fireplace.  The mantle was probably eight feet long and about five feet off the floor.  The grate was centered beneath the oversized mantle. On each side of the grate was a bench, inside the fireplace, called the master’s chair.  A rack by the grate provided a place for the master to put his feet to warm his toes by the fire.

      Having refreshed ourselves with the bed and our breakfast, we departed the stone house in time to get to Bob Ward’s farm by 10 o’clock.  We found nothing surprising about his machinery except his combine.  It was green and said “John Deere” on it, but it was quite different from our combines.  Bob explained it was made in Germany and was indeed different from those manufactured in America.

   The farm crops were quite diversified, with wheat maturing (a beardless variety, as was most of the wheat we saw in England), a barley crop struggling for life in the drought they were having at the time, and a field of hops. 

      The hops grew on vines that attached themselves to wires supported by tall posts, like telephone poles (a phrase probably doomed to extinction in our wireless age) or light poles.  With the posts, wires and vines, the hop yard looked like a big bird sanctuary.

     The farmer gathers the hop flower and takes it to a dryer.  When sufficiently dry, the farmer can sell the hops to a brewer.  The quality of the hop is determined by the acid content, the better flower having more acid.

     In Bob’s operation, nearly everything was done mechanically, from harvest to transport.  Apparently, the farm had been in the hop business for many years.  He showed us the drying floor where in the old days hops were spread to allow them to dry.  Gas or electricity-fired dryers have replaced the drying floor.

    Bob told us a story about harvest in earlier times.  They would go to London and gather up a load of derelicts two or three days before harvest.  They would feed and house them and let them dry out.

    Harvest consisted of putting men in wagons with high sides.  The men stood on the sides of the wagon and manually plucked the hop flowers from the vines beside them and overhead, dropping them into the wagon below them. 

      When the wagon was loaded, it would head for the barn.  The men would throw the hops up onto the drying floor, the second story of the barn, a lot like the hayloft in American barns.  Other hands spread the hops around the floor, making sure the hop flowers weren’t stacked too deeply so they could dry out and not spoil. 

       Harvest finished, the laborers were paid off.  Some drifted off.  Others accepted a ride back to the city to take up where they left off.

     We saw a lot of amazing things in our three-week tour of England, from museums to castles and cathedrals, but the visit to Bob’s farm was one of the most memorable for us farm boys.  It all began in the pub with that brazen hussy’s provocative announcement.

Books I have Read

      There used to be (maybe still is) a program on National Public Radio called “The Radio Reader”.  A fellow named Dick Estelle from the University of Michigan, I think, would read books in 30-minute installments.  It was a bit like the old radio soap operas where you tuned in the same time every day to keep up with the story.

      When our local NPR station stopped carrying “The Radio Reader”, Dick was a few days into a book, Pompeii by Robert Harris.  The fictional story takes place a day or two before and during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.  I was hooked, but only recently did I check out Pompeii from the local library.

      In the story, the hero is put in charge of the aqueduct that supplies water to Pompeii and other communities.  The old overseer of many years has mysteriously disappeared.  The aqueduct breaks down and the new “Aquarius”, the overseer, has to find the problem.  In the process, he stumbles across corrupt politicians and a scheme by a former slave who has established himself as a power broker and the richest landowner in Pompeii. 

      The former slave bribed the former Aquarius so that his many holdings, including swimming pools and baths, pay little or nothing for their water.  Repairing the aqueduct takes the Aquarius to, you guessed it, Mount Vesuvius.  Having restored the aqueduct to service, he releases his crew and heads for the summit of Mount Vesuvius to try to find the cause of the aqueduct failure.

      He finds in a pit on the summit the weeks-old-dead former Aquarius.  The fumes from the pit nearly do the new Aquarius in.  The fumes do get the assassin hired by the ex-slave to kill the new Aquarius.  The Aquarius is an hour or so down the hill when Vesuvius begins its eruption.  Will he make it?  I don’t know.  I haven’t read that far.  Sorry.

     The book I just finished was a page-turner that was difficult for me to read.  QB VII by Leon Uris has two heroes, the first a Polish doctor who was imprisoned by the Nazis in a concentration camp.  Upon being released from the concentration camp by the Russians, he relocates to England.  He marries and has an infant son when Poland, now under communist rule, tries to extradite him to be tried for war crimes.  He is accused of helping the Nazis carry out medical experiments on Jewish prisoners. 

      Having spent three years in the concentration camp, he now spends two years in a British prison awaiting the results of his extradition hearings.  He maintains the accusations are all a communist plot to do away with everyone who opposed the communists.  When a witness who was sterilized by the Nazis fails to pick the doctor out of a lineup, and when confronted face-to-face with the doctor, the witness maintains that the doctor wasn’t the man who castrated him, the good doctor is finally released from prison, extradition denied.

    The doctor takes his wife and two-year-old son he has never seen and heads for deepest, darkest Borneo where he can practice medicine out of the limelight and underneath the radar of the Nazi hunters.  There he manages to discredit the witch doctor and convert the natives to modern medicine and modern sanitation methods. 

     His son is not interested in medicine at all, but the son of a Scotsman also living in the jungle, is interested and attaches himself to the doctor, becoming an adopted son and apprentice.  The doctor rises in the ranks, becomes the head of all the jungle hospitals and medicine in general in the area.  Eventually he is knighted for his work.  He returns to England with the adopted son while his own son moves to America to complete his education.  The adopted son attends medical school in England.

      The second protagonist is a Jewish kid in America.  He and his older brother hang out at an airport near their home.  The brother learns to fly and joins a foreign air force (not sure which one) when World War II breaks out and American is not involved.  The younger brother also learns to fly, but is too young to fight.  He leans towards journalism, writing. 

      The older brother is killed in combat.  The younger brother bides his time until he is old enough to join the army.  He becomes a fighter pilot and is badly wounded in combat.  He is temporarily blinded.  He is befriended by a British lass and they fall in love.  She disappears when the bandages come off his eyes, thinking he will find her ugly.

     The writer’s friend, also his publisher, arranges for a “blind date” to help the writer forget his lost girl.  Of course, the blind date is the missing girlfriend.  They get married and have a son and daughter, but they don’t live happily ever after.  The British lass isn’t happy away from her England home, even though they live in some luxury near Hollywood where the writer makes a good living prostituting himself to the movie industry.

      Goaded by his friend and publisher, the writer decides to write the good work he is capable of.  To do so, he must forsake Hollywood.  His chosen subject, the Holocaust, becomes the title of his book.

   The two stories come together when the doctor’s adopted son and understudy reads the book and finds a paragraph, only one paragraph, where the writer accuses the doctor, by name, of collaborating with the Nazis on medical experiments on Jewish victims, specifically, sterilizing them.  The adopted son confronts the doctor who denies the charge.  The adopted son convinces him he shouldn’t put up with the false accusation.

      The doctor sues the writer for libel.  The trial takes up the second half of the book.  It is conducted by the most famous lawyers in London.  The writer’s lawyers dig up many former concentration camp victims.  They are hard to find because most of them, having discovered after their release from their prisons that their families are all dead, they have moved to a new country and have changed their names in an attempt to  forget the past and start a new life.  It is very painful for them to dredge up the past and to recall what they have tried to forget.

     Another difficulty in reading the story is the knowledge that one of our heroes will lose.  In the end, there are no winners.  The jury finds in favor of the doctor, but in light of some very damaging testimony, they award him one half penny in damages.   The writer’s son, a pilot in the Israeli air force is shot down and killed in the six-day war shortly after the trial ends.

     So why did I read that book?  Leon Uris has a way of making you understand someone else’s point of view. The best example of that would be Trinity, a book about Northern Ireland and the conflict between protestant and Catholic.  I never understood the Irish Republican Army and its tactics until I read that book.

     QB VII gives you another look at the Nazis, the Nazi hunters, and the post-World War II era.  It will take tour mind off your own troubles.   

Load of Hay

     I opened the hood on the blue Ford pickup.  The tractor driver turned his machine my way, but I waved him off.  The snow blew in wisps around my feet in the millet stubble.

    It was another Uncle Ricky adventure. His father-in-law needed hay for his cattle.  Ricky arranged with Ed to get a load of bales on that weekend.  It was Sunday afternoon and we were about out of weekend.  The weather was rotten.

     It had snowed earlier.  The snowfall was done, but the wind and the drifting wasn’t.  The hay bales were still in the field.  They were in bunches where the bale sled had dumped them, six to a bunch.

     Ed had a Case tractor with a frontend loader equipped with a hayfork.  We had removed he grain sides from the old Chevy truck.  With its tandem axle, it wasn’t very mobile in the stubble field with small drifts of snow. 

     Ed’s tractor could easily handle one of the stacks of six bales, two stacks if conditions were right, but conditions weren’t right.  The bottom three bales of many of the stacks were frozen to the ground.  The tractor had trouble freeing the stack without destroying the bottom bales.  The tractor would deliver the bales to the truck where three or four of us would stack them on the truck. 

       It seems nothing went right.  We restacked more than once to get the load distributed evenly on the truck bed.  The nasty north wind made sure we got faces and eyes full of snow, dirt, and millet hay.  Since the truck couldn’t move very well, the tractor had to haul the bales farther as the loading progressed.  In the back of our minds was the thought that if Mother Nature turned on the snow spigot, it would really get nasty.  We were quite vulnerable out in the middle of the hay field on the flat old plain.

     Getting the truck loaded was the last thingto do on our weekend, and we decided to leave for home directly from the hayfield when the loading was accomplished.  We had driven our Ford pickup to the field with the truck.  Another car sat beside the pickup.

      The loading took probably twice as long as it would have in fairer weather.  But eventually we had the eleven or twelve layers of bales on the twenty-one foot bed.  Ropes had been webbed over the load and secured.  But the poor old truck wouldn’t move. 

     Ed chained the tractor to the front end of the truck and tugged it along to the field edge where the truck could get enough traction to move itself.  The truck moved onto the county road where it had a fifty-mile journey to get the bales to their destination.  It was getting late.  Uncle Ricky had to deliver the bales and return to Nebraska.  I didn’t envy him his journeys. It would probably be early Monday morning before he got home.

      The rest of us returned to our vehicles.  The car took off and exited the hayfield.  I tried to start the Ford pickup.  It wouldn’t start.

      Ed was beginning to load his own truck with bales for his own cattle.  Once more out in the biting wind, I popped open the hood.  I had been down this road before.  Moisture would build up inside the distributor cap and short out the ignition.

      When Ed turned to come to my rescue, I waved him off.  I was pretty sure I could handle this problem.  I popped off the distributor cap, which on the 390 engine was on the front left, very accessible.  With a dry rag, I wiped out the beads of moisture and replaced the cap.  I knew better than to close the hood before the engine was running.

     This time when I hit the starter, the engine took off.  I closed the hood and we were off, over the drifting, wisping snow in the millet stubble, down the path to the county road, over the county road to the paved state highway. 

    We reached I-70 without further incident.  I thought about Uncle Ricky and his trip.  I thought about Ed in the hayfield now alone loading his own truck.  Not much good thinking about what you have no control over.  About fifteen miles east on I-70, we ran out of the ground blizzard.  We fought the north wind for the entire 170 miles, but the wind didn’t seem so threatening without the snow.       

     We reached home safely and reported to work Monday morning as usual.  The weekend adventure didn’t do a thing to improve my opinion of hay handling.