Over the Farmer's Gate Read Online Free PDF Page B

plunges his hand in his pocket and thrusts out a big handful of what looks like dark brown chewing tobacco, and says: ‘Want some?’
    I ask him what it is. His accent is very strong but I eventually find out it is called ‘dulse’ and it is dried seaweed. He tells me it is gathered off the rocks, dried in the sun for a couple of hours, salted and is then ready to eat. I try some; it’s OK. It has a taste reminiscent of laver bread my mam used to get me out of the fish stalls in Cardiff market. She used to fry it with bacon but that was in a more liquid form.
    Just because I quite like it, it doesn’t mean that I want to eat it by the bucketful but he keeps it coming. I start to wonder how long it’s been in his pocket so I tell him I’ve had enough for now.
    He tells me he’s been eating it for 60 years and he’s got 14 children, which is probably another good reason for not eating it. He tells me his wife eats it as well and he tells me what it does for her. I can’t repeat that but you can probably work it out for yourself.
    That’s five days ago now and I’m still picking bits of it out of my teeth. Next day, I buy some dulse in a shop. The shopkeeper tells me that it kept thousands of people alive along that coast during the famine, so that’s good.
    I reckon next time I go to the pub on a Saturday night, I’ll have some in my pocket and keep chewing away at it without saying anything, until they ask. By then it could be cannabis, or who-knows-what. It cost me £1.20, bet I’ll get good value out of it.
    If I get the village hooked on it and it has the same effect, like 14 children per family, it will help keep the village school open.

    IT’S BEEN dry now for several days and I’m on my way, on the tractor, for my first full day of field work. It is logical that the driest field will be the highest field and that’s where I’m headed.
    In the hedgerow is one of those concrete Ordnance Survey markers that tells me I am working at 984 feet. If anyone asks, I’m working at 1,000 feet, which doesn’t seem an unreasonable exaggeration in the circumstances. The only company I have up here are a neighbour’s sheep in the next field and, of course, the wildlife. On the way up here, on the track that runs through the field, cock pheasants stood like sentinels every 50 yards or so.
    The approaching tractor drives some of them in front of meso they come up against their neighbours and a fight breaks out. They are so preoccupied with the fight they will break up only when the tractor is inches away and they usually take to flight, and I often wonder if they ever get their places back.
    Today’s job is rolling, which isn’t too taxing on the concentration as long as you get the steering right. As the steering part of the job becomes instinctive you have the opportunity to switch off a bit, listen to the radio and take in your surroundings. I’ve been given our ‘best’ tractor today, which came as a bit of a surprise, and my preferred choice is Radio 2 until 5pm and then Radio 4.
    About the only thing that can go wrong from a tractor-driving point of view is for the roller to become detached from the tractor. You should become quickly aware of this because the progress of the roller is marked by a sort of trundling noise you can hear even in your sound-insulated cab and above the radio.
    I once had a lad working for me, who I sent rolling, who must have ‘switched off’ in quite a big way because he hadn’t secured the metal pin that attaches roller to tractor properly. The pin had come out but he’d carried on driving for about half an hour, up and down the field, the roller sitting in splendid isolation where he’d left it.
    He didn’t realise what had happened until I went to see how he was getting on. He begged me not to tell anyone but refused to tell me what he was thinking about to be thus distracted. I only told one or two people: that’s all you need; a story like that will soon gather its