Mr. Pick had already ploughed the fields into rows, and spread them with manure, and on this we set the potatoes, going up each furrow bent almost double, with a basket of potatoes in one hand, and setting the potatoes evenly with the other. Later Mr. Pick split the rows, thus covering the potatoes from each side.
After a few days of setting I spread manure one morning. Or perhaps I should say 'muck'. And after all, 'shaking muck' sounds much more business-like than 'spreading manure'. Surprisingly, I liked this job. In common with most people in the towns, I had expected to find jobs like spreading manure and cleaning out cow houses, etc., rather distasteful and smelly. Much to my surprise I found that I rather liked them, including the smell! For under these conditions it became a very healthy and open-air kind of smell - much more pleasing than many of the smells one meets with in towns - drains, dustbins, public houses, chemical works and the like.
Just a week from the day I had arrived at the farm I made my first attempt at handling a horse in the fields. Mr. Pick was harrowing the rows - the last operation after setting, and I was thinking what a lovely job that would be if only I could do it, and wondering how many months it would be before Mr. Pick would think I was capable of trying it. Suddenly across the field came Mr. Pick's voice.
'Mary, how about having a try at this?'
I left my fork in the hedge bottom, and went across.
Before long I was striding up the field, holding the two handles and watching the curved harrows, and trying to keep an eye on Dolly. But I soon found that she was quite capable of keeping in the furrow between the two rows which were being harrowed, and the only time I needed to use the leading strings which stretched from each side of her bit to my hands was when we turned at the end of the rows.
Mr. Pick came round with me for a while, and I began to enjoy it thoroughly once I had discovered how to get Dolly into the right row at the headland.
It was with some trepidation that I saw Mr. Pick finally leave the field altogether and go off across the road to the farm. What would happen now, if Dolly decided to stop? Or, worse still, decided to go somewhere else? For she was many times stronger than I was, and could have gone wherever she would, taking the harrow (and me) along with her.
It has always amazed me how obedient horses are to humans. It amazed me, too, to see that she plodded along, putting her big feet in the narrow furrow straight in front of each other, never once side-stepping onto the row.
I found later that this applied to whatever they were doing - drilling, harrowing, scruffling - they hardly ever did any damage to the crops.
Very soon, all was going well. We were swinging round quite reasonably at the ends, and the tines of the harrows were leaving regular, straight lines up the rows.
I harrowed for the remainder of the day apart from a break for dinner, and felt quite at home with the job by tea-time. I tried to work out how many miles would have to be walked before the field was finished. Roughly 54 rows to the acre, Mr. Pick told me. But I didn't know how long each row was, so I gave up.
The war seemed a long way away as I went up and down the field. But it came a great deal closer in the night, for there was a raid on York. We didn't hear the siren, as we were so far from Easingwold that we could only hear it when the wind was blowing strongly in our direction. But we heard the planes, and the vibrations of the bombs shook the windows.
Apart from interruptions such as this, I slept like a log as soon as I lay down. I also ate as I had never done before. And I had as much as I wanted, and it was good and well cooked, for which I was very thankful.
I had a number of days in the field similar to the first one - spreading muck, setting potatoes and harrowing, as we gradually worked across the field. We finished by setting a few rows round the headlands.
I learnt that the early potatoes were set nearer together than a main crop and late, and that it takes something between 15cwt. and a ton to set an acre, according to the size of the sets; sometimes more than a ton if Scotch seed potatoes were used.
Note: English weights and measures can be rather obscure. An English pound (abbreviated as 'lb' from Latin 'libra' which was a weight) is the same as an American pound. Fourteen pounds make a 'stone'. Eight stones make a hundredweight abbreviated as 'cwt'. This means, of course, that there are 112 pounds in a hundredweight. Then there are twenty cwt in a ton. The ton is sometimes called a 'long ton' because it is 2240 pounds
Setting potatoes went on almost to the end of the month as a kind of background to everything else. In between we did a number of other things which were new to me. Indeed, until I had been the round of the seasons I was doing new things half the time, for on a farm of course the work is continually changing, and only the feeding and general care of the stock remains roughly the same.
I spent one or two mornings cleaning mangolds again, and one morning raking up 'wicks' across one end of a field. This made me think of an old friend of ours who had been a farmer, and who waged constant war on the couch-grass, only being from Cheshire he called it 'twitch'. Wherever he was, in garden or field, he would point his knobbly stick, and shout - 'Ah, twitch! Out with it! Out with it!' He had good reason for this, for it is a bad thing to get rid of if it once it gets a hold.
Each morning about 10 o'clock, Mrs. Pick brought us a hot drink and something to eat; a cheese sandwich, a buttered scone or something of the kind. And very welcome it was too. Nothing tasted quite so good as this snack, eaten sitting on the soil in the middle of the field, or wherever we happened to be at the time. It was usually referred to simply as our '10 o'clocks' or sometimes the 'lowance. It is always very welcome, whatever it is called. It provides a very good excuse for a breathing space and a chance to look around.
From the potato field I could look across the lane to the farm, and beyond that to the orchard trees, and could see the first spray of pear blossom. Later it was the May blossom on the thorns near the pond, and the field around the farm was covered with daisies and buttercups.
One day I went on the wagon with Mr. Pick along the track to a hay stack which stood in the corner of the top field. Mr. Pick cut square slabs of hay from the stack with a hay-spade, and forked them down to me on the wagon, telling me where to put them to for a good, firm load. I gradually rose higher as the load grew. I was getting used to handling a hay fork, and found it a useful tool for a lot of jobs. But even so I doubt if the load would have ever landed to the farm if Mr. Pick had not kept on giving me instructions. When the load was finally finished, I expected that I would have to get down and walk back, but I found to my joy that I stayed where I was, so that I could fork the hay down to Mr. Pick when we reached the fold. So before long I was doing something that I had always wanted to do - riding on top of a load of hay. For as long as I can remember, whenever I have seen anyone riding home on top of a load of hay pulled by a horse (a tractor would not do - a horse was an essential part of it) I longed to do it myself.
And here I was, actually doing it. And although circumstances were different from anything I had ever imagined, it definitely came up to my expectations, and I was sorry when we reached the fold.
For three days in May we bagged potatoes. This was a much more complicated job than I had expected. The soil had to be stripped off the potato pie, and the straw rolled back until enough potatoes were bare. Then a thing called a sippet, the like of which I had never seen before, or even heard of, was used to shovel them up on to the riddle. They passed over the riddle, and ended by dropping into bags which were hooked on at the far end. The smaller ones fell through the riddle, and were used for feeding the pigs.
My job for the three days was to turn the handle that worked the machine. I got the hang of it quite soon, and found that I could turn it with my right hand and at the same time pick off any bad potatoes from the riddle with my left hand. The skep into which the pig potatoes fell had to be watched too, and emptied when it was full. At the end of the third day I felt that I could very well have qualified for a barrel-organ!
May 25th, being Whit Monday was a holiday ('Whit' is Whitsuntide, seven weeks after Easter, and is a Bank Holiday), and as if to celebrate it the first thing that happened after we had fothered was that we found a family of young hedgehogs in the tillage shed amongst the straw. And a few minutes later we found a pied wagtail's nest in the thatched roof of the cart shed. I climbed up to this and found that it contained four young birds.
That day was a red-letter day, for Mrs. Pick had invited Mother and Dad and Mrs. Freeman and Phyllis for the day.
During the afternoon we looked around almost every hole and corner of the farm. Phyllis and I took a ladder to the orchard and went up to a wood pigeon's nest in a tall holly tree. It was very windy, and felt rather like being on a ship at sea. But it was worth it, for we found two young birds, perched on the rather frail platform of their nest, looking at us with questioning eyes. They were almost ready to fly, and did so a few days later.
June brought quite a new set of jobs, and for days just about all my working hours were spent on my knees - weeding.
On June 1st. we began on the parsnips. I was certainly not prepared for the way we did this job.
Mrs. Pick came out with me, and showed me how to tie the pieces of sacking round my knees. This is not quite as simple as it sounds, for there is only one way to tie the string to be sure that they will keep for the whole of a morning under any circumstances.
Thus equipped, I looked down at my feet. Dungaree trousers, sacking tied on with band, boots shod with iron. Did they really belong to me? I felt that I only needed to change my name to Giles for the transformation to be complete. Especially when, a few minutes later, I found myself on my knees in the field with a row of parsnips between them.
I had a hectic time at first trying to keep up with Mrs. Pick. Eventually I got the knack of it, and all went well. I found it to be a very pleasant job, and whenever I think of it I can still smell the strong scent of the parsnips - exceptionally strong for such small plants.
On some days Mrs. Pick was out in the field for most of the time, and at times I was alone. Creeping up and down a field in this way is apt to make you feel rather insignificant at times. Alone in the middle of a field, with more empty fields all around, and slowly creeping up a row, with similar rows stretching as far as you can see from that lowly position.
Only a worm's eye view as Mrs. Pick remarked!
A few days later I changed to carrot weeding, which I liked even better. For one thing, by the time I started on the carrots my knees had recovered from their first soreness. I had though they were tough enough to stand anything, but after two days of creeping around over rough ground and stones they were red and very tender. However, helped by methylated spirits, both this and the stiffness which the unusual position had caused were quite gone, and I felt I could go on creeping indefinitely. The soil of the carrot field was fine and sandy, which improved things even more.
Mrs. Pick brought my 10 o'clocks.
'Well,' she said, 'How do you like this job?'
How did I like it? I looked around at the far hedge, the blue sky flecked with white, fluffy clouds, the red roof of the farm across the lane. A skylark rose suddenly from near the hedge, flooding all the field with his song. The warm, sandy soil between my fingers; the row ahead, a muddle of weeds and carrot plants; the row along which I had come, where a thick line of feathery carrot plants stood in the sun, clean and unhampered by weeds. Like it? I loved it!
Nor did the shower which followed, leaving little pools of water along the rows and mud which stuck to my fingers making the weeding difficult cause me to change my mind. Carrot weeding seemed, and still seems, one of the best jobs.
In those days I really got sunburnt - a tan which did not wear off for years. I remember a day when it was so hot that Mrs. Pick and I put huge rhubarb leaves on our backs by way of protection as we crept along.
There were many interesting things in the soil itself when seen at such close quarters/ It was impossible to move along for more than a yard or so without seeing some kind of life in the fine, sandy soil around the plants. Beetles and other insects of every imaginable hue would go scurrying away as I pulled up a weed - blue, green, red and even orange, and beautifully marked and really lovely to look at. Ladybirds, some red and some yellow, would creep under cover. There were leather-jackets, the larvae of the Daddy-long-legs, and spiders in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. Wire worms too, the grub of the click beetle, which may live in the soil for four or five years, feeding continuously, before turning into beetles. These I learnt to kill on sight, having seen the damage they are capable of doing. Indeed it seems amazing that all the frail, feathery carrot plants managed to exist at all, surrounded as they were by so much opposition in the form of grubs, weeds and weather. But in spite of it all they flourished.
I often wonder just how long it would take to learn all there was to learn about the teaming life to be found in just one square yard of soil. The weeds too, were many of them lovely. So many varieties of flowers there were, most of them beautiful, and only termed 'weeds' because they happened to grow where we wanted to grow something else.
Even the worms were varied and interesting. And I would sometimes come across a feather, half buried in sand, or perhaps stuck straight up in the soil like an arrow. Some were black, probably shed by a rook or a crow. Some belonged to a magpie, and had a bar of white across the middle,. Sometimes I would come across a tiny yellow feather, which I thought must come from the breast of one of the blue tits or great tits which were usually flitting along in the hedges. Such tiny feathers they were, but so perfect in every detail of shape and colour.
As in gardening, so in farming - at this time of the year everything needs doing at once, and it was not long before I was trying my hand at hoeing. Sugar beet and mangolds were the first crops to be ready, and I had some difficulty telling one from the other, for at first they are much alike.
I did not like hoeing as much as weeding, and when after a while I got the job of following two hoes (again on my knees, but this time between the two rows) and singling the small groups of plants, removing all but the best one, I was well pleased. At first I kept getting left a long way behind, and then Mr. Pick would single his row himself until I caught up, but as the time went on I got used to it and managed to keep up with the two who were hoeing.
Next we hoed the kale, then the potatoes (the easiest of them all,) then the turnips. And by that time they were all ready to begin again, starting with the parsnips. This second weeding and hoeing went on amongst other jobs until hay-time.
And so the weeks passed - warm sunshine, plenty of variety and interest, and a worthwhile job. These things made up the total of most of my days in my first few months on the land.