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.