A monthly anecdote of Suffolk living

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Beanz Meanz……excitement

…..a bunch of excited, young, jabbering foreign students is a whole different bushel of wheat.

by Guy Massey

We tend to keep ourselves to ourselves in this little backwater of Suffolk. It's not that we don't welcome friends and guests who take the trouble to tackle the bumpy drive to see us - of course we do and we admire their stamina in doing so - it's just that we don't make a huge effort to get involved in village life. It's over 35 years since we moved here, to what was then an unwelcoming, unloved, uninhabitable farmhouse; its condition so bad that the local council had condemned it as 'unfit for human habitation'. But now, we like it here, we are happy here, and anyone who needs us knows where we are.

I think it is safe to say that Debs has more to do with the village than I do and equally safe to say that I am much more interested in the broader picture of national and international affairs than she is. However, just for a short period around this time of year we are both thrown right into the middle of the hurly-burly of international affairs, helping to ensure that the meeting between East and West remains entente cordiale. Although, just for a short while this year, it looked as through the entente was going to be not so quite cordiale.

We are surrounded by arable fields. 35 years ago we could see fields belonging to nine different farmers. Now, as far as the eye can see in any direction is farmed by just two farmers. Fortunately, over the intervening years, our surrounding fields have escaped the worst of East Anglia's farming consolidation whereby pretty five- and ten-acre fields, with their own gates and hedgerows, have been amalgamated to form one large, cost-efficient, easily-farmed, prairie-type field which is so much in evidence in West Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire.

One of the joys of living here is to watch the annual rotation of crops. Although there are farmers who grow nothing but winter wheat year in year out our neighbouring farmers still follow a traditional East Anglian three- or four-crop rotation, albeit slightly modified for modern farming practices and consumer demands. Within that rotation, which includes, winter wheat, spring barley, sugar-beet, are peas and beans. And very often peas and beans are grown in the same field.

The cereal crops are, of course, harvested with huge, monster-looking, crop-guzzling combine-harvesters which cover the ground at a rate that retired farm-labourers find barely believable. Peas and beans though, at least those which are sold in-the-pod as opposed to in-bulk, are still picked by hand as they have been for generations. But it is a very labour-intensive, back-breaking operation and getting the labour nowadays to do it proves to be a major problem for growers. Traditionally, the women from the village would be employed on piece-work and would welcome the extra money. Now either they don't need the extra money or they have taken up easier, higher-paid, full-time employment in one of the local call-centres; the 20th century equivalent of the 19th century work-house. Gypsies, another source of valuable help, have either been urbanised or completely run out of the area. And, of course, no British student worth his salt would bother rising from his or her, and probably both, bed of slumber to hand pick peas and beans when exotic gap-years in Thailand are on offer. All of which leaves the struggling farmer to secure labour from where he can get it. And lately that has been students from the Eastern European countries - Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Russia - coming to the UK firstly to either learn or improve their English and secondly to earn what they consider to be a reasonable wage. Certainly we get the odd, and sometimes they are very odd, Australian and New Zealand student but it's not many days before they show their superior leadership skills by becoming gang-leader and taking over the tractor-driving whilst leaving the Eastern Europeans to do the more mundane manual picking.

There isn't much activity with modern farming practices. A few days ploughing, a day or so drilling, a few more days top-dressing and spraying and then harvest. It's difficult derive any real pleasure from watching a solitary tractor slowly, hour after hour, criss-crossing a field in each direction turning over the stubble and exposing the fresh brown soil. But a bunch of excited, young, jabbering foreign students is a whole different bushel of wheat. We don't actively get involved in the picking operations but when they are near the house the dogs and I might wander over to chat to them while the bags are being unloaded or the machines serviced, and over the course of a season we will get to know their names and a bit about the families of those who speak better English. They practice their English and we pass the time of day; a fair exchange.

Early one morning last week, just after the gang had started work, I was walking back up the drive with the dogs when Mrs Belldey from The Old Vicarage bumped and lurched her way into view in a very expensive and very sleek-looking car that must have felt totally out of place anywhere other than the west end of London. She stopped and we started to chat away about one thing and other. She said she was on her way to see Debs to discuss the forthcoming flower festival in the church; Debs gets involved with flower-arranging. After a few minutes I realised that Murphy had wandered off and was not in sight. The distress of the dogs wandering off is matched only by the sheer pleasure of talking to Mrs Belldey. Debs often says I would prefer to live with Mrs Belldey than her. Well, of course I couldn't comment on that.

Having more time on our hands then either of us was prepared to admit, we chatted away for quite a while before she continued her way up the drive. As she left Lad got up from lying on the verge where he had been minding his own business and I started to look for Murphy. Having called and whistled and shouted for about ten minutes or so, all to no avail, we started to wend our way home. As I walked passed the entrance to the field where the gang had just started the day's picking, I just caught a glimpse of a black tail sticking up. Further investigations revealed the most distressing sight.

When the gang had arrived that morning they had, as usual, left their packed lunches on the ground by the side of the field. Murphy, with his incredible nose, had found them, got them open, and was steadily going from one end to the other guzzling all he could find. I was appalled. Those poor students, in some corner of a foreign field, away from home, away from family, and now with no lunch. It was too awful to contemplate.

I continued back up to the house in despair, thinking about the repercussions. At lunch time, when a well-earned break was due and expected, the students would be distraught, to put it mildly, to find that their lunches had gone. The Latvians would blame the Estonians, the Estonians would blame the Poles and everyone would blame the Russians, who would in turn blame everyone else. The repercussions of this were far reaching. World peace was at stake here. In 20 years' time this incident would be remembered at international summit meeting.

Debs and I had our own summit meeting in the kitchen and it was decided that we would spent the morning preparing ham and cheese sandwiches, on a basis of three sandwiches per student. We included a hard-boiled eggs, a soft drink and an apple. Around one o'clock we piled it all into the Land-rover and set off on our most important mission of mercy. We were in time. Just. They were still picking their way up the last row before stopping for lunch.

We explained what had happened and why we were there. They seemed very understanding and we are still feeling rather smug with this act of diplomacy and how, just for once, we were able to play our part, albeit small, in averting an ugly international incident.

© Copyright Guy Massey, August 2002

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