Those lazy, hazy days of Summer

Those lazy, hazy days of Summer

Who remembers rainy summers? It’s curious how the tedium of bad-weather summers is forgotten or glossed over as we reminisce on times past. In the Tír na nÓg of our youth the sun was always shining during the holidays. The days were long and warm and filled with all kinds of inventive good fun. What is there to remember about a day spent staring close up at the rain streaming down the misted, narrow windows of childhood? Only traumatic times or the bright fun-filled moments get caught in the fragile web of memory. The ordinary and the tedious; all that is now labelled ‘boring’ by a demanding generation, gets lost in recollection. It is as if it was not worth the space on the disc of our human Random Access Memory.

One of the summer chores of a country child was helping with the savin’ of the hay while the sun shone. All hands, even young hands, were welcome in any harvest-field. Hay-making, of necessity, took place during a period of good weather. It was a delicate and worrisome task for the concerned adults. The hay had to be cut at a carefully chosen time. Weather conditions needed to be warm and breezy with the promise of a few days more of good drying conditions. Turning hay by hand with a pitchfork was a tedious but skilled task. It required a deft and skilful turn of the wrist while wielding a fork-full of heavy, moisture-laden, hay-in-the-making. The narrow line of cut-grass had to be flicked over like a fringe so that the moist layer underneath could be exposed to the sun. In the turning over, a whole new under-world of frogs, worms and insects was exposed. If the hay had been cut mechanically, there was the possibility of finding animal or bird casualties. Corncrakes’ nests were often destroyed by the blades or wheels of reaping machines.

If weather conditions were favourable, the hay was turned a few times, manually or by machine. It was then combed into fluffed-up rows of bristling dry stalks to await the devouring mouth of the baler. In especially bad weather, a farmer might have to abandon his hay until the weather changed or even lose his crop altogether. Some farmers of the old school took up their pitch-forks and whisked the endangered hay into ‘laps’. These small whorls of hay looked like croissants and were deftly shaped so as to run off the rainwater that threatened the crop. Another emergency procedure was to pile the dried hay into small hay-cocks with the added protection of a covering of jute-bags.

The arrival of the baler signalled the beginning of the end of a farmer’s hay-worries. These dangerous gobblers of hay and straw were generally hired, with their driver, from local contractors and were paid by the number of bales excreted. These were ‘stooked’ or stood up in tripod-like formation until they could be loaded on to a flat trailer and transported to a hay-shed. They were fiendishly hard to manage. Bales of the traditional kind were small but dense and heavy. The bands of baling-twine that held them tightly together were taut and hard to grip. The cut-hay was sharp and occasionally prickly as well where a stray thistle had managed to become part of the harvest. The skin immediately below the harvester’s fingernails was inevitably peeled back by the end of a day ‘at the bales’ and the underside of the farmer’s famously sun-tanned arm looked like a pin-cushion, pierced by the spiky ends of the hay-stalks on the side of the bales.

The chance of a ride atop a trailer-load of bales was much prized by holiday-bound children. It was a potentially dangerous trip as bales were an unstable cargo and bale-builders were of mixed ability. Driving a tractor at funereal pace through an open field was often allowed to the young too as all adult hands took to lifting and building the bales on to the trailer. First lessons in driving were often received during hay-making. A feeling of inclusion and of belonging to the adult world was enhanced as all hands helped with the hay-harvest. There was, in the North, an unofficial deadline of having the hay in by ‘The Twelfth’. It was not as if we were going anywhere on the day but rather a parody of the concerns of our more Northern neighbours.

The era of hay-making is all but over. Our mechanised age has speeded up the process and largely beaten the weather-worries as tall, green-cabbed harvesters spit out their large spools of rolled-up hay and silage. It’s a common and ugly sight now to see black polythene balls of fodder, seemingly abandoned by all but the crows, in the corners of our fields. In removing the excess labour, the risk of crop-failure and the awkwardness of the oblong bale, we have also removed the camaraderie of the hay-field, the harvest-sense of satisfaction on the part of the successful farmer and the adventure-fest that often marked the start of the summer holidays for a country child.