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Published: January 13th 2013
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What a fantastic summer vacation castrating maize in soustons provee to be. We caught the train from Nottingham to the rugby and farming heart of Southern France to take up seasonal farm work.
I had to hitch hike half the way back as I hadn't saved enough from the wine funds to afford a return ticket. I thumbed to Bordeaux to get the train. I was only slightly worried about the woman who picked me up and "took me home for breakfast". My French was awful and I could not quite understand that it was only breakfast she was offering. So I was relieved when a bowl of warm milk arrived and then a tap of the watch to sign time to get to the station.
We were young, we were virile, we were free.
We were students. We were skint, and we were to get paid for "Maize Castrating" - that's pulling the tops out of girlie maize plants that the farmer does not want to cop off with stronger maize plants.
Maize castrating. Without people like me your side order and salad would look worse than it does today and the Green Gint would not be so tough and jolly.
Soustons and farm work was also an opportunity to experience first hand seasonal work a la George Orwell and his hopp pickers of Kent in the 1940s. It was a chance to experience some of Hemmingway's bull culture. It provided the opportunity to get a dose of both in the sunny homeland of Camus.
I offer no apologies for giving you my version of Orwell's hop-picking narrative and Kent experiences near word for word - and written up so perfectly in "A Clergyman's Daughter." I'll use it as the backbone for this page. At 20 I was still an Orwell officianado. Think of this page as me duo'ing with Pavarotti at the Christmas karaoke.
"IT WAS remarkable how easily I settled down to the routine of maize-castrating. After only a week of it I ranked as an expert castrator, and felt as though I had been castrating maize all my life.
"It was exhausting, it kept us on our feet seven hours a day, and we were dropping with dehydration by one o'clock in the afternoon, but it needed no kind of skill. Quite a third of the pickers in the camp were as new to the job as myself. Some of the lads had come down from the employment exchanges in Glasgow's and Tyneside's housing estates with not the dimmest idea of what maize was like, how we castrated them, or why.
"One day on a Soustons maize castration farm was very like another except Bastille Day weekend. On most mornings, at half past five and pre dawn, we'd each feel the frame shake on our stinking, sweaty, cramped tents, and we would crawl out of our sleeping nests to begin searching for a half presentable tee shirt and a near clean pair of boxer shorts. The chaotic reveille was accompanied with curses of “Debout ! Debout !” from the supervisor. Having screamed himself hoarse the farmer's lackie would wait next to the Citroen van, his yellow smoker's fingers tapping the hood.
"Ten minutes later twenty four youthful lads and girls were packed as mackerel into the back of the van. We set out for the fields, many miles drive through the French lanes, with our heads throbbing from the previous night's wine. On rare occasions we were allowed to stop for a poor soul to chunder out the back door. Other days we needed to detour into Soustons town to pick up those that had not made it back to the camp and were still snoozing under the pallet tables in the square.
"It was scorching hot by eight o'clock on those July mornings, the eastern sky brightening from a deep mid blue to a dazzling bright white, but at six the maize tops held a sheen of icy cold dew - shocking wakefulness into our bodies.
"The maize were divided up into horizon touching plantations that Virginian tobacco growers would have gasped at. Twenty castrators or thereabouts, under one hardened French foreman, castrated Jacques' complete estate that summer. One field at a time.
"The maize plants grew five to six to seven feet high, though this year it was slightly less as the weather had been somewhat odd. The tall stems were lined up across the fields. Four rows of weaklings, to be castrated, to each row of proud untouchables, that were sacred and were not to be knackered.
"As soon as we arrived we were set up alongside the rows and ordered to march, and castrate. Into the wet rows two feet apart each castrator advanced, in shorts, tee shirt, and at the start of the day a raincoat - to protect us from that chilly dew. Later our kagoules came off and our silly little hats went on to fend off the sun. Bare feet were preferred on the fine and sandy soil.
"Only the taller castrators, like me, could see their fellow’s heads bobbing through the rippling fields. The shorter pluckers, with arms raised above their shoulders as they tugged out the offending genitalia could only see down through their own lane to the hedgerows at the work's end.
"An hour after our start we would appear out from the row ends like ghosts in that baseball film that Kevin Costner bloke was in (slight deviation from George Orwell here), when him and his wife lived in the middle of nowhere, in a film I have forgotten the name of it, errrr, ummm, errrr, "They Will Come" was it? Yeah, that will do, we would appear like the ghosts from a Kevin Costner baseball film. Hungover ghosts, quiet white shadows.
"Public embarrassments followed each row's completion as the foremen would throw at any offending castrator’s feet the weakling maize heads that were missed or only half destroyed. These chastisements affected who was chosen for additional work later in the season.
"Piece rates were the order of the day. French francs paid to the equivalent of one bottle of three star red wine per hour spent active in the field. Seven days a week. This was not bad when totalled up over one and a half months. It was sufficient to drink ourselves blind every night and to rest lazy and sunburn our shoulders at the nearby beach each afternoon.
"On bad days, when the maize bollocks weren’t quite ready to be yanked, we crawled on hands and knees along the sandy soil, it sticking wet to our knees and palms, pulling up weeds and yanking out stunted maize plants.
"From six till midday we were castrating, castrating, castrating, in a sort of passion of work, which grew stronger and stronger as the hours advanced, to get each row done and shift our bodies closer to an afternoon on the ocean shore, and an evening in Soustons' taverns.”
There. Orwell to me. Kent's hop picking to Souston's maize castrating. I'm sure George wouldn't mind.
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C. Harley
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Ah the memories!
Wow. This is brilliant. Was it Jacques Laudouar's farm that you worked on? I was there in 1990 (I think) with a load of others from Ireland. The craic we had in 'Bar le Club' etc. So good to hear your blow by blow (pull by pull?) account of working the maize. I had erased that part out of my memory? Sunburn, heatstroke and epic hangovers :-)