No trouble at mill

I can't help disagreeing with Patrick Kavanagh when, in his poem On an Apple-Ripe September Morning, he suggests that "carrying bags" is "the best job at the mill".

The mill in question was a threshing mill – one of those old wooden-framed contraptions that were run off the belt-drive of a tractor, and now extinct, having been replaced everywhere by combine harvesters.

But I worked on such mills myself a few times. And contrary to the poet’s view, I would argue that there was no job to compete with being up on the platform, feeding sheafs of wheat and barley down into the jaws of the machine.

There, not only did you lord it over those on the ground, you also basked in the glory of perceived danger. A wrong move and you might feed your leg into the machine. However slight the risk, it added to the glamour.

Then again, I speak from the world-view of a former 13-year-old boy, who has never forgotten the excitement of being promoted to those heights.

As for carrying bags – jute bags, filled with grain – I never had that privilege. They were still heavier than I was then. And by the time we would have been a match, the old-style threshing had gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Still, I’m glad I saw it, at least in its twilight years, because even discounting for nostalgia, threshing day was the most exciting event of the farming calendar, bar Christmas. And it ran that close too.

Like Christmas, it had an eve of anticipation – the night before when, usually, the mill would arrive from its previous job. Parked overnight in the haggard, its strange, hulking silhouette really did look like a dinosaur.

Then the great day would dawn, little changed in the half-century since the one Kavanagh described. It was still a communal event, like an Amish barn-raising. All the neighbours came, even though there wasn’t work enough for half of them.

That wasn’t the point. To paraphrase Milton, they also served who only stood around smoking woodbines (barley seemed less flammable then than it is today); or as Kavanagh put it, “paying bills of laughter/and chaffy gossip in kind”.

Of course, they all had to be fed. And for the likes of my mother, the logistics of this, and the stress levels, probably did surpass Christmas.

I remember one infamous year, she ran out of butter mid-dinner, and had to put out Stork margarine in its place. For a self-respecting housewife then, this was an occasion of deep shame.

Cholesterol hadn’t been invented yet, and margarine was still only for cooking. No sane person ate it, voluntarily. But needs must, and my mother hoped the workmen wouldn’t notice, or if they did, that nobody would pass comment.

And nobody would have. Except that, distracted by her catering crisis, my mother had committed the unforgivable act of refusing me the place among the men that my station demanded (I was at least eight at the time).

So hell having no fury like a small boy scorned, I sneaked up to the table with the Stork-infected butter dish, and blurted the truth, before my mortified mother could choke me. As I discovered that day, hell had at least one greater fury than that aforementioned.

Still, I prefer to dwell on the non-violent memories of the era – the laughter, the conversation, and the profound if fleeting happiness that came with saving the harvest.

Normal rules were suspended on threshing day. I recall, for example, within minutes of my elevation to the mill-top, being embarrassed to lose my father’s second-best penknife into the machine. Even that, it turned out, was an occasion for smiles.

You weren’t a proper mill-man until you’d lost at least one penknife, I was assured. The main thing was to hold on to your legs. In the meantime, it might be good idea to tie the next knife to your wrist, as veterans did.

Anyway, today is another apple-ripe September morning, which means that the Kavanagh Yearly, the annual weekend in the poet’s memory, can’t be far away. Sure enough, I’m told it will take place from the 26th to the 28th of this month, in Inniskeen.

I gave the keynote address a few years ago, an honour that surpassed any mill job. But the Yearly has gone up in the world since then, obviously. The keynote speaker for 2014 will be the President, no less. Full details are at patrickkavanaghcountry.com.

@FrankmcnallyIT