In the latter days of June, Cousin John helped us to mow, tedd and bale 127 small round bales of hay of around 35kgs each.
In the 1940’s we were surrounded by small farms and colliery-tips, and local farmers and schools liaised for us children to spend three weeks each year helping with crop harvesting.. The young men were at war and so old men and women led the horses pulling the mowing machine through the grass prior to it being raked and spread to dry.
The next job was for adults and bigger children to use two pronged ‘Pitch Forks’ and rake and pitch the hay onto a special cart with extended front and back boards. When full, it was pulled to a site for the haystack. Sometimes boards were placed across staddle stones to form a base for the stack but often the base was hard earth. Pitchforks built the stack (also known as a Rick) and a sloping roof of straw, bracken or whatever could be used as a thatch, was completed by a man on top of a ladder. Hay should be no more than 13% moisture, or it could spontaneously combust. I remember such a conflagration on Adlington’s farm. In the 1940’s few farms had sufficient buildings for storing hay and so losses were high due to weather and rodents. When war ended many military buildings were quickly re-purposed for farm use.
Arthur had 18 dairy cows with a few fields of hay, turnips, and potatoes but his home and farmyard adjoined Ken Sweetmore’s butcher’s shop with its door in a wall, through which bullocks passed to slaughter on their way to our zero-food-miles wartime minced-meat ration of 227 grammes, per adult per week.
Nowadays, haymaking is easier with our Polish made small round baler. Britain does not have the engineering skills or facilities to build this kind of equipment anymore. In the 1960’s accountants discovered that making money by selling insurance, and ‘intellectual’ services around the world was easier than making things in Britain, in fact Harold Wilson, PM at the time said; “Britain has industrialised on the textile industry, and so we should let 3rd world countries do the same. Consequently, government and banks decided that money was better invested abroad than in Britain. What was not said was that thousands of engineering companies who made the machines that made the products and the knitting elements such as needles & sinkers, plus the tool maker and instrument maker work also went abroad.
55 years later we still wear clothes and have cloth-based products such as upholstery, curtains, carpets, and bedding, but the folks making them live abroad. Fewer than a million Britons now produce textiles products, but they do so on machines made elsewhere. Was Mr Wilson right?
There is no doubt that today’s Britons have more money than our grandparents. We have more ‘things’ and can travel more widely. We access data as well as opinion flaunted as knowledge on-line, and the need for physical work has diminished. So, what is there not to like? Readers can make their own list, but I will ask a question rarely raised by our leaders as they set a course for our nation.. What is the highest ‘good’ that an individual should strive for, and what, if any, role does the State play in helping us attain it?
I am sure that at the philosophical, psychological, social and theological level the ‘Highest Good’ includes the words ‘Worship your creator, and treat others as you want to be treated.’ (Both the Old and New Testament give us these two leading principles)
Behind the first set of words lies the concept of personal humility, and the gratitude which follows our admission and submission that we are not as clever or virtuous as we might think.
Secondly, to love our neighbour as ourselves means we should act in their interest and not our own. This involves a kind of personal sacrifice. To judge them in any way would be to claim a moral advantage for ourselves, but when we do that, we negate the humility inherent in our submission to a higher being.
This reasoning is behind the saying that, “Even if you do not believe in God, it is best for you psychologically and everyone else socially, that you act as though there were a God.”
Any reader who has fully grasped this conceptual nettle: will know how sharp is the sting, but how sure is the cure.
View from the Pew 