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Community / About the house
A life to remember
John Nash is a retired, well sort of retired, fruit farm manager in Kirdford who enjoys scribbling about life on the farm from the now to days gone by.
There was a feeling of great sadness over the farm this spring. We have lost one of our family. In over half a century as a fruit farm we have had many pickers attend our autumn harvests. Of these, perhaps around fifty have become part of the farm’s family, as they, then their children, followed by their children’s children, have joined us to gather the fruit every year. There was, though, one lovely lady who had a very special place in our hearts. Our Gladys. Gladys was already an established picker when I arrived on the farm 50 years ago, and she remained with us until the last tree was grubbed a decade or so ago. I have written about her time with us in our local village magazine, but I felt her story was deserving of telling to a wider audience and while doing this it got me recalling a time that I look back on with great affection. It also made me realise just how fortunate I was to have witnessed those wonderful years. I came into farming just as the countryside was recovering from the struggles of the war. A time when farming was under a massive restructuring. A multitude of new machines were coming forward to replace the dwindling workforce, and old methods of work were being replaced by a raft of new ideas. In the world of the orchard, trees were being replaced with ones that didn’t need ladders to harvest them. Varieties were being bred for the new love of sweetness and crispness. We were starting to buy with our eyes instead of our tastebuds! In the dairy world the milker with their bucket and stool was replaced by a machine that milked the cow without the need of any human intervention. A changing world. In the fields, gates were widened and hedges removed to make way for giant harvesters that ate their way through the corn fields with ravenous appetites that the reaper of a couple of decades earlier would have never dreamt of.
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Our Gladys worked on through all these changes. A wartime member of the Women’s Land Army, she greeted all these changes on the land that she so loved so much with a stoic shrug of the shoulders. A response of “Got to get it done, ducks” would be her work ethic to any task presented to her, no matter what the effort needed. With her husband Bill they worked their own farm as well as giving a willing hand to others when help was needed. So it was for half a century that she would come to the harvest… whatever the weather. The only time I saw her in a bad mood was on the day I thought that a lady of eighty-plus years should not be required to climb a picking ladder… and removed hers and hid it. I tried to explain the reasoning behind my decision but I was made very well aware of my error in a most forceful way! In fact she never fully forgave me and her granddaughter told me she still occasionally remarked about my error until the day she died. The end of season lamb roast always ended with a plate of her apple pie laced with thick cream followed by hugs and kisses as we once again wished each other a happy ten months until we met once more for the new year’s crop. Such was life around the villages in those days. For so many it revolved around the farming season, carrying out the various roles needed in helping out in the tasks as the year progressed. Now those orchards have gone. No more chatter and laughter echoing through the long rows of fruit. No more children in tears as they try to find lost mums and dads among the tangle of loaded branches. Most of all though, no more like Gladys. Folk who were the very heart of a village. Who spent their lives giving their all to the soil they worked and the friends they knew. Bless them all. One other thing… Gladys demanded a gift on her final day of working with us. It was a gift that we all were so very happy to give her. She left with it clutched tightly in her arms: her picking bucket! I think after fifty years, she’d earned it! John Nash
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