Strawberry Fields

Up river in Beaulieu this weekend, they’re celebrating the annual strawberry festival. You’d never know it; the weather’s currently more in keeping with root vegetables. That won’t deter the crowds. It’s one of those events that features a superabundance of food: in this case, a flan big enough to feed the five thousand.

Please, sir. Can I have some more?

This makes it roughly the 18^th time we’ve managed to miss the festivities. It’s not that I’ve got anything against strawberries – other than that tasteless variety they grow under plastic in Spain to sell under plastic in supermarkets. Quite the contrary. I just have a horror of any kind of seething mass of humanity, whether congregating to sample this year’s harvest or, as they do in Lewes each November, to light fireworks in the streets and cheer on men mad enough to rush about with burning barrels of pitch on their back. Ever since the last of those particular spectacles I witnessed as a student in Brighton, I’ve preferred to stay far from the madding crowd.

It was our recent visitor – my wife’s friend and EFT mentor – who inadvertently reminded me of another reason for spurning the strawberry festival. Gwyneth was telling me about her subscription to eMusic and showing me some of the stuff she has downloaded onto her iPhone. I happened to notice some Van der Graaf Generator tracks. It turned out that we share a love of that ponderous band, whose gloomy albums came out in the early ‘70s on the Famous Charisma Label. A thinking person’s Led Zeppelin, she described them. Music for self-harm, I would prefer.

‘Love’ is perhaps too strong a word in my case. I managed to kick the habit when I grew out of my anguished teenage phase, but kept their albums as some kind of mementos mori. At the time, though, I was such a fan that, in the absence of a lyric sheet with my copy of Pawn Hearts, I borrowed a friend’s and painstakingly transcribed in tiny hand all of Pete Hammill’s (many, many) words onto the inner sleeve. 

What, pray, has this got to do with strawberries? There is a connection. It’s to do with a group of intrepid sixth formers who, for two summers, took the overnight boat from Belfast to Liverpool and thence, via trans-Pennine train, to an ex-POW camp near a small town called March in the Fens. The landscape was as flat as it is around Chartres in northern France, and on certain fine summer’s days you could see the spire of Ely cathedral in the distance.

Riot in Cell Block #9

 

It was a camp called Friday Bridge and we would sleep in the big Nissen huts that used to house the Italian prisoners of World War 2. Imagine, a dormitory full of teenage boys! We were there to pick strawberries and – in the management’s hope, I guess – spend the results of our back-breaking piece work in the communal bar, where we Belfast boys would drink a foul brew called barley wine and sing impolite rugby songs. Fortunately, I was more motivated then – as now – by an insatiable appetite for music. Faced with a choice between barley wine and the LPs I could buy when I got to London, well… it was no contest.

Inevitably, there were drunken shenanigans. There was one night… Maybe it was the conclusion to the day when a crowd of inmates gathered around an open window to watch, on a television within, David Bowie perform ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops – in bright orange hair, knee-length boots and a quilted jump suit. I went to bed reasonably early to get a good night’s sleep in preparation for another day’s hard slog in the strawberry fields, only to be woken up by Stinker McCallum and a group of drunken cronies, insisting that I get out of my lazy bed to sing ‘The Sash my father wore’ with them. I was tired and not sufficiently sectarian to know the lyrics of the Orangemen’s battle cry, so I told Stinker to leave me to sleep in two words of one syllable. It was not the most diplomatic way to handle the situation. Stinker started hitting me; I hid under the bedclothes; and a new friend of ours from Manchester jumped out of his bed to fight the good fight of the dormant. I can’t remember how it ended. I suspect I still sat beside Stinker the following term in A-level English.

The work was grim and poorly paid: the kind that these days might be carried out by gangs of illegal immigrants. Weekly work rotas would go up on the notice board at the weekend and you’d congregate early each morning, waiting for a ride on a flat-bed truck or a tractor trailer to Farmer This or That’s endless fields. The lucky ones might be allocated to the canning factories or to the potato sheds, where you would stand all day at a conveyor belt removing stones and clods of mud from the procession of spuds that passed by en route for the sacks. I did that once. Every time I closed my eyes for the next 24 hours or so, I saw potatoes dancing about inside my head. 

We usually got there several hours after the gypsies, who started around six, worked at a Formula 1 speed and then packed it in at lunchtime. You’d take your buckets, wander off to the serried rows of soft fruit, get down on your hunkers and then shuffle off towards the horizon like a toddler with a full nappy. Eating the occasional pesticide-enriched strawberry or periodically taking a full bucket off to get weighed and emptied punctuated the boredom. At the end of the day, you’d exchange your tokens for real money – to be spent, by the diehard boozers, on barley wine.

Second time around, all the xxxx beds ended inevitably in tears. On the last night, things got out of hand and all the beds in our particular punishment block found their way outside. The head honcho turned up with some security muscle and ordered the boys from Belfast off the premises. As part of a small group, pretending not to be scared by the shrieks of the animal kingdom on that pitch-black night, I remember lugging my heavy case across fields and along interminable roads as far as March railway station.

I think I travelled to London with Billy Ellison, a sensitive ‘yoot’, who mumbled almost inaudibly and parted his long hair when it flopped in front of his face, like someone opening curtains. A year above me, he would later go off to Cambridge, only to be last seen begging on the streets of Belfast. We travelled by train and then by bus. When it stopped for 10 minutes or so at Peterborough coach station, I nipped into a record store to buy a copy of Pete Hammill’s hot new solo album, Fool’s Mate. It was a kind of rapid aperitif to a lazy afternoon with headphones on a floor cushion at the first Virgin Record Store in London, where I spent my hard-earned lucre on things like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Pharoah Sanders’ Deaf Dumb Blind, my first jazz record. 

So you see, much as I enjoy eating the local strawberries that are now beginning to appear at Martel market, the memory of the hard labour involved in picking them has given me another compelling reason for avoiding the annual fruit fare in Beaulieu.

As for Van der Graaf Generator, Gwyneth told me that – like so many blasts from the past – they got back together again, went on the road and produced a live album or two of golden greats. I’ll give them a miss.