A monthly anecdote of Suffolk living

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Summer Guests

...neither the summer, nor Suffolk, nor us, is all she had hoped for.

by Guy Massey

It's funny how people can get the wrong impression. Every teenager ever born thinks their parents lead the most boring life possible, and those teenagers who have the misfortune to be born in the country suffer the double whammy of having boring parents and living in the country. It's so unfair! "Nothing ever happens in the country, it's so boring," they whine. "Why can't we live in the town?" Actually, when the truth is told, parents don't lead a boring life at all - it's just that they just keep the excitement from the children - and quite a lot happens in the country. There is always something going on, as Penny recently discovered when she came to stay, it's just whether you are interested in what it is that matters.

Most of our friends envy what they think is our quite, peaceful, stress-free life in the country. But they really don't know.

For many years we have had very good friends in the diplomatic service. They are currently stationed in Delhi in India. Peter is a junior ambassador and looks to be a rising start having done all the right things: Eton, Sandhurst, one of the Guards regiments. Penny is his wife and they have two teenage boys who attend a well known public school courtesy of the British taxpayer. Peter was posted to Delhi early last year having spent five years in Berlin and one can only guess at what a culture shock it must have been moving from the disciplined Berlin to the chaotic Delhi. Having suffered the worst of the heat, dirt and general squalor of Delhi last year Penny stated in her Christmas email that she would never remain in India for another summer. Debs took this as an invitation to say to her: "Oh do come and stay the summer with us. It would be such fun. You'd love it." I wasn't so sure myself but couldn't really find a flaw in the idea. As it is we take in all waifs and strays and lost causes. And anyone else who wants to stay.

Thus Penny and the two boys are presently 'enjoying' an typical English summer in Suffolk. I use the word enjoy reservedly for I fear that neither the summer, nor Suffolk, nor us, is all she or the boys had hoped for. During the spring when we communicated more regularly than perhaps we had done in previous years, Penny kept reiterating how she was looking forward to spending the summer in the peace and quite of Suffolk with its clean, fresh air. It seemed churlish at the time to say that if she wanted peace and quite then she would be better coming in January or February when the whole county tends to hibernate due to either the cold wind blowing in from the Urals or the heavy rains coming being driven in from the north. But perhaps, in the light of events, I should have.

Penny arrived first about ten days before the school holidays started. It has all but been forgotten as agriculture has receded into a minor, almost insignificant industry, that the long summer holidays school children presently enjoy stems from when, from the age of about eight, they were required to do a full day's work in the fields to help with the harvest. Harvest in those Cider-with-Rosie days was a long drawn out affair lasting from around the middle of June to early September and schools naturally closed for this period. It was also slow work with all the hay and cereal crops being cut by hand with a scythe. Every 15 or 20 minutes the cutters would stop and take out a whetstone from their back-pocket and run it up and down the blade to hone the edge before continuing. The men in their prime, those up to around 35 years of age, would cut the standing crop, slowly but steadily working their way across the field, while the older and less-able men and the younger boys tied up the sheaves, stacking them in stooks in the field before crating them to a nearby barn for winter storage. This was in the gentler age of genuine horse-power; long before the diesel-produced horse-power of the combine harvester.

Incidentally, it is a little known fact that the words 'combine-harvester' derive from the 'combining' of two different 'harvesting' operations; namely cutting and threshing. In the days up to just after the second world war, harvest involved cutting the cereals and carting the stooks - grain and straw - to the barn. Then, during the following winter, the local threshing contractor would tour around the area threshing the grain out of the ear and separating the wheat from the chaff. But those days have gone. Harvest now is undertaken in one sleek operation with a crop-guzzling combine harvester.

Not many days after the boys arrived, one of the two neighbouring farmers started to cut his hay and silage. The silage wasn't so bad as it was just cut, blown straight into a trailer and carted away - admittedly we heard the tractors droning away from dawn to dusk and the banging and clattering of the empty trailers returning up the drive from the silage clamp - but, because of the wet summer, the hay turning seemed to go on forever. It would no sooner dry up and look ready for baling than the rain would return and all the turning would start again. The tractors never seemed to be out of the field.

Then, just as the hay-making was finishing, the cereal harvest started in earnest. As the summer has been so wet the harvest has been a hit-and-miss affair. They would no sooner start combining and get one or two trailer loads away than the rains would come over bringing the whole operation to a halt. Occasionally the trailers would be left in the fields but most of the time they would be taken back to the yard. And we are talking serious trailer here. None of the traditional post-war, wooden, two-wheeled trailers. No, we are talking huge double or triple axle trailers with 15 - 20 tonnes capacity pulled along by enormous 200 plus horse-power tractors. And, as speed is of the essence, the young tractor drivers -often agricultural students - use the drive as a training circuit for the British Grand Prix resulting in the trailers banging and clattering and practically flying up and down the drive.

I don't know whether Penny was just unlucky or we have got used to it, but virtually every time she went out, either in the car or on foot with the dogs, she would have to take evading action from one of these monsters. It's quite a long way from the main road to the house and there aren't many places to pass. Invariably it is us, although during this summer it seems to have been Penny, who has had to back up to allow one of these units to pass. It's only fair really. Firstly, we only have a right-of-way over the drive - actually it is only a farm track but as it leads to the house we jokingly call it a drive, and secondly it can't be easy trying to reverse one of those trailers when it is so large you can't even see over the top of it.

Early one Saturday evening a week or so ago, Debs had just finished making a jug of pre-dinner Pimms when Penny arrived home having taken the boys somewhere for a weekend away. She was looking forward to the weekend without them as much as they were looking forward to doing whatever young teenagers do when they are away for a weekend. Don't ask, it's best not to know! It was a nice warm, sunny evening with a gentle south-westerly wind blowing. Great drying weather. I suggested we went outside and sit on the old teak seat near the pond and feed the fish. Unfortunately we had just settled down and started to talk about how the Police had found what they suspected was the bodies of the two ten-year old girls missing for two weeks from Soham in Cambridgeshire, than the combine started up. I think Penny's nerves must have been pretty frayed by now anyway because she just about flipped. "My God, I don't believe it," she screamed. "Is there never any peace here?" Debs and I looked at each other. We didn't really know what to say for the best. The combine made its way down the field where we heard it turn around, engage its mechanism, and start back up the field. If I had given it a moment's thought I would have realised what was coming. But I didn't. I just sat with the others drinking Pimms and chatting and trying to ignore the sound of it cutting its way up the hill. Just as it got to the top there must have been a extra strong puff of wind for as it turned around to start back down the hill, a huge cloud of dust and chaff and other debris from the back of it blew in over us, covering our drinks, and everything else, in a thin layer of dust. "Oh my God," Penny cried. "This is worse than Delhi. I came to Suffolk for peace and quite and what do I get? Noise, noise, and more noise, with a coating of dust." I felt it was a slight over-reaction as nobody could really compare Delhi with Suffolk but Debs, ever the diplomat, said: "It's okay Pen. It will soon be over. They will finish that field by midnight and then all they have to do is that one there." I don't think she had the heart to say that when the combining is finished the farmers like to run over the fields with a set of discs to break up the stubble before ploughing and often in a dry year one can't even see the tractor for dust.

I fear Penny might have had the wrong impression of Suffolk and that we wont she her again next year. But, as Debs says, it will soon be over. Then all that will concern us is the tractor headlights flashing around the bedroom for most of the night as driver slowly ploughs his way across the field.

Despite the noise and dust of Suffolk we wouldn't swap our lives for the noise and dust of New Delhi.

© Copyright Guy Massey, September 2002

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