2007 - Two Caravans Page 4

  As for this new girl, Irina, she is far too free and easy with that dimply smile of hers, and Yola has noticed the way the Dumpling’s eyes linger on her longer than is strictly necessary. She picks strawberries that are more white than red, and answers back when Yola politely draws this to her attention, and sniffs when Yola tries to teach her the correct handling technique, which is like this, you have to cradle them in your palm from below, never more than two at a time, like a man’s testicles. Don’t squeeze them, Irina!

  OK, I admit I wasn’t the fastest strawberry-picker, but I didn’t need that bossy Polish auntie to point it out to me in that vulgar way.

  This was my fourth day here, and I still couldn’t believe the pain in my back and knees every time I bent down to strawberry level. When I stood and straightened up, my bones creaked and groaned like an old woman’s.

  The Ukrainian boy would slip fruit into my punnets when the men’s rows and the women’s rows came together, which was nice of him, but I wished he wouldn’t stare at me like that. Once when I sat down for a rest, he came and sat beside me and popped a strawberry in my mouth. Well, I could hardly spit it out, could I? But he’d better not start getting any ideas, because I haven’t come all this way to spend my time fending off the advances of a miner from Donbas.

  I had enough of it fending off advances from the boys at school. They were generally primitive types who just wanted to grab all the time—not very romantic—and they had no idea whatsoever about tender words and gallant gestures. In my opinion, everyone should read War and Peace, which is the most romantic book ever written, as well as the most tragic. When Natasha and Pierre come together at last, it gives you a feeling inside that is quite fiery in its intensity. That’s the sort of love I’m waiting for—not a quick thrash behind the bushes which is what all the boys seem to be interested in.

  “Love is like fire,” Mother used to say. “A treasure, not a toy.” Poor Mother, she is getting very middle-aged. Her mouth would pucker up in a disapproving lipsticky pout when we passed those girls on Kreshchatik wearing skirts that were just a little strip of cloth between their navels and their knickers, laughing with their mouths open as the boys splashed them with beer. Although it is more romantic if a girl saves herself for the one, still there was something unsettling, something knowing about those open-mouth smiles. What was it they knew and I didn’t? Maybe here in England, away from my mother’s prying eyes, I would be able to find out. Watching the ripple of that miner’s arms as he lifted the pallets of strawberries got me wondering about all that again. Just wondering, Mother. Nothing more.

  There is a lay-by further up the lane that forks to Sherbury Down, sheltered by a row of poplars, from where you can look down over the field through a gap in the hedge. From this vantage point Mr Leapish the farmer sits in his Land Rover and surveys the rustic scene with satisfaction. The men, he observes, like to race each other along the strawberry rows, while the women are attentive to each other, and don’t want anyone to get left behind. Mr Leapish is mindful of this difference, and has given the men new rows to pick, while the women he assigns to go over the rows that have already been picked by the men. The women earn less, of course, but they are used to that where they come from, and they don’t complain. Thus by working with the grain of human nature, he maximises both productivity and yield. He is pleased with his skill as a manager.

  Today is Saturday, pay day, and he will have to fork out for their wages later, so his mind is particularly focused on issues of arithmetic. Eight punnets per tray, half a kilo per punnet, eighty kilos per picker per day on average, six days a week, over a twelve-week season. His brain ticks over effortlessly in mental-arithmetic mode. When this field is picked out, they’ll move on to another one down in the valley, then back up here again after the plants have re-berried. Pickers are paidsop a kilo, before deductions. And each kilo sells at £2. Not bad. All in all, it’s not a bad little business, though he doesn’t make as much as that newcomer Tilley up the road with his acres of polytunnels. He could get more if he sold to the big supermarkets, but he doesn’t want the inspectors poking around in his caravans, or asking questions about the relationship between Wendy’s business and his business. The beauty of it is that half of what you fork out in wages you can claw back in living expenses. And he’s helping these poor souls make a bit of money that they could never get their hands on back where they come from. So that’s a bonus.

  At one o’clock precisely, he will drive up to the gate and honk the horn and watch the strawberry-pickers pick up their laden trays of punnets and make their way down the field. He should really pick up the trays more often in the warm weather, and get the fruit into the cold store. That’s what you have to do to sell at £2.50 a kilo to the big supermarkets. But the local petrol stations that are his outlets don’t ask questions.

  Maybe the Ukrainian boy will already be down there, waiting to open the gate. Keen. Good picker. Hard worker. Wish they were all like that. This new girl seems a bit of a dead loss, but maybe she’ll speed up a bit when she picks up the rhythm. Nice-looking, but not very forthcoming—at his age, he needs someone who knows what she’s doing to get the old motor started. Don’t know why Vulk sent her—he’d asked for another man. Now Vulk wants her back. Maybe he’ll put her to work in another of his little businesses. Well, he’ll have to see how she performs at the check-in. If she’s useless, he might have to let Vulk take her off his hands.

  After the check-in he’ll let the poor souls have half an hour for lunch, which he has brought in the back of the Land Rover. As always, it’s sliced white bread, margarine and cheese slices. Today he’s particularly pleased because he’s found a new supplier that sells a white sliced loaf for ipp. He was paying 24p a loaf before. Eight loaves a day—two for breakfast, which they eat with jam, two for lunch, which they have with cheese slices, and four for dinner which they eat with sausages—over several weeks—it all adds up. The new girl is small, and he reckons she won’t eat much, so he hasn’t deemed it necessary to increase the provisions, except for an extra loaf of bread. This feeding regime, he has calculated, provides a perfectly balanced diet at minimum cost, with carbo-hydrate, protein, sugars and fats, all the essential energy-giving nutrients they need. The fruit-and-vegetable requirement is present in the strawberries, which they eat naturally during the course of the day, and which also help to keep them regular. Some farmers let their workers buy their own food, and don’t let them eat the strawberries, but Leapish reckons his system is more cost-effective. They soon get sick of the strawberries. Yes, even with the commission he pays Vulk for living expenses, he reckons he can still make on it.

  Each worker pays £49 per week for food, including tea, milk, sugar and as many strawberries as they can eat (where else could you live like a lord for less than fifty quid a week?), and £50 per week rental for their caravan bunk, which in this part of the country and at the height of the summer holiday season is extremely reasonable. In fact maybe too reasonable. Maybe he should be charging £55. At least, in the men’s caravan. The women’s caravan, admittedly, is rather small. But it has a special place in his heart.

  He looks at it, perched there at the top of the field like a fat white hen, and his eyes go a bit misty. This is the caravan that he and Wendy went off in for their honeymoon, more than twenty years ago—a Swift Silhouette, latest model, with bags of storage space, built-in furniture and fully equipped kitchenette complete with two neat gas rings, a miniature stainless-steel sink and drainer with a lift-off worktop, and a compact gas-powered fridge—how Wendy had loved it. That caravan park above the cliffs at Beachy Head. Spaghetti bolognese. A bottle of Piat d’Or. They had certainly given that fold-out double bed some hammer.

  When they had gone into the strawberry business, seven years ago, Wendy had been in charge of the caravans. She had set up a separate company to provide the accommodation, food and transport for the pickers—that’s how you get round the red tape that restricts how much you can deduct from
wages. This is what’s crippling the country, in his humble opinion—red tape—as though making a profit is a dirty word—he has twice written to the Kent Gazette about it. Yes, it had been more than a marriage, it had been a real partnership. Of course things were different now. Pity, really, but women are like that. Jealous bitches. Anyway, not his fault. What man wouldn’t do the same? No point in being sentimental about it. Yes, it was a good size for two people, could fit four at a pinch. Five? Well, they’d managed all right, hadn’t they? But the men’s caravan—it’s a static Everglade in pale green, the sort you can hire ready-sited in scores of windswept caravan parks on cliff tops overlooking the English Channel—that had once been an abode of great luxury, with ruched pink satin curtains and quilted velvet seats, now admittedly more brown than pink, and propped up on bricks since one of the wheels had gone missing. Probably those New Zealand sheep-shearers, though heavens only knows what they wanted a spare caravan wheel for. Acres of room in it. An extra £5 each—that would bring in £20 per week. He needn’t tell Vulk. And that would be £20 a week nearer to achieving his dream.

  Yes, although Mr Leapish is a practical man, he too has a dream. His dream is to cover this whole sweet south-sloping sun-bathed strawberry hillside with polytunnels.

  At six o’clock the shadows were lengthening across the field. When the horn of the Land Rover sounded again down by the gate, I picked up my tray of strawberry punnets and carried it down to the prefab.

  “How many you got, Irina?” asked Ciocia Yola, sticking her nose into my tray. OK, I admit I had only filled twelve trays all day. Marta had filled nineteen. Yola and the Chinese girls had filled twenty-five each—you should see the way they go at those berries. Anyway, they’re smaller than me, and they don’t have to bend so far. The men had filled fifteen trays each that afternoon, and another fifteen in the morning. Each tray carries about four kilos of strawberries. I could see the farmer was annoyed. His face was red and lumpy like a strawberry. Or maybe, according to Yola, like a testicle. Anyway, I kept my face absolutely expressionless as he told me that today I’d earned £14, barely enough to cover my expenses, and I was going to have to do better. He spoke slowly and very loudly, as though I was deaf as well as stupid, waving his hands about.

  “NO GOOD. NO BLOODY GOOD. YOU’VE GOT TO PICK FASTER. ALL FILL UP. FULL. FULL.” He swept his arms wide, as if to embrace all his pathetic punnets. “DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

  No, I didn’t understand—the shouting was flustering me.

  “OTHERWISE YOU’RE DOWN THE ROAD.”

  “Road?”

  “ROAD. DOWN THE BLOODY ROAD. YOU GET IT?”

  “I get blood on road?”

  “NO, YOU SILLY COW, YOU GET ON THE ROAD!”

  “I get silly cow on road?”

  “OH! FORGET IT!”

  He slammed my tray onto the pallet, dismissing me with both his hands in a way that was quite uncivilised. I could feel tears pricking at the back of my eyes, but I certainly wasn’t going to let him see that. Nor Yola, who was standing behind me in the queue with her full tray and her smug gap-tooth smile. And behind her was Andriy, gawping at me with a grin. Well, he could go to hell. Nonchalantly, I sauntered up the field to the women’s caravan and sat down on the step. They could all go to hell.

  After a while, I heard the farmer’s Land Rover pull out of the gate and putter away down the lane. A pleasant stillness descended on the hillside. Even the birds were taking a break. The air was warm, and sweet with honeysuckle. An evening like this is a gift to be treasured, I thought, and I wasn’t going to let anything spoil it. The sky was pale and milky, with shining streamers of silvery clouds over in the west—a real English sky.

  Vitaly and Andriy were relaxing on the back seat of Vitaly’s car enjoying a can of lager—apparently the rest of the car is disintegrating in a hedge somewhere on the Canterbury bypass. Typical Vitaly. Tomasz had disappeared into the next field to check his rabbit traps. Emanuel was sitting on a crate outside the men’s caravan with a bowl of strawberries beside him, writing a letter. The Chinese girls were curled up on Marta’s bunk, reading their horoscopes. Marta had already lit the gas under the pan of sausages, and our little cabin was filled with a smell that was both mouth-watering and disgusting at the same time. Yola was having a shower. I stretched out on her bunk just for a moment. I was feeling so tired, every muscle in my body was aching. I would just have a little rest before dinner.

  I AM DOG I RUN I RUN I KILL RABBIT I EAT ALL I LICK BLOOD GOOD BLOOD MY BELLY IS FULL GOOD BELLY-FULL FEELING I FIND RIVER I DRINK GOOD WATER I DRINK SUN IS ON ME WARM I REST I LAY MY HEAD ON MY PAWS IN THE SUN I SLEEP I DREAM I DREAM OF KILLING I AM DOG

  It is Marta’s belief that our daily food is a gift from God, to be prepared with reverence, and that eating together is a sacrament. For this reason she always tries her best to make a pleasing evening meal for the strawberry-pickers, but tonight is Emanuel’s eighteenth birthday and she has made a special effort to rise to the challenge of the unpromising ingredients provided by the farmer.

  In the pan, the sausages have already turned bright pink and a greyish gelatinous fluid is oozing out of them and soaking into the bread, which Marta has cut up into strips and put to fry with the sausages and some potatoes that Vitaly found by the roadside. There are some wild ceps, and some green leaves of wood-garlic waiting at the side of the pan, which she will stir in at the last minute. The remainder of the bread she has pressed into dumplings with a sprinkling of mauve thyme-flowers and a pair of pigeon’s eggs which Tomasz found in the woods. They are boiling merrily in a pan. Marta is cooking up all the sausages—the men’s as well as the women’s. Why? Because Polish women are proper women, that’s why.

  Ciocia Yola is taking a shower, preparing herself for another sinful night of love with the farmer. The sun must have warmed the water in the barrel to a pleasant temperature, for Ciocia Yola is singing as she rubs herself with perfumed soap, a tuneless wordless song. Ciocia Yola is not a good singer.

  Then there is a tap-tapping on the side of the caravan and a man’s voice speaking in Polish. “Lovely ladies, I have here a small offering with which you may enhance our supper.” It is Tomasz, with the bloodied body of a rabbit in his hands. “Maybe the lovely Yola would accept this small token of my affection.”

  “Leave it on the step, Tomek,” Ciocia Yola calls from the shower. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”

  “Maybe you would like me to skin it for you?” He looks hopefully towards the shower. There are some holes in the plastic screen, but they are in the wrong places.

  “It’s OK. You can leave it. I know how,” says Marta.

  She takes the dead rabbit from him with a sigh, and strokes its fluffy fur. Poor little creature. But she has already worked out a nice recipe in her head to send it to the next world. Tomasz is still hovering on the doorstep, and a moment later is rewarded by the sight of Yola emerging, wrapped only in a towel.

  “Go away, Tomek,” she says briskly. “Why are you hanging around here like a bad stink? We will tell you when dinner is ready.” He slopes off down the field.

  In Marta’s opinion, her aunt would be better off with a decent serious chap like Tomasz, even if he does have some oddities, than with some of these ex-husbands and would-be husbands she seems to go for. But Ciocia Yola has her own ideas about men, as about everything else.

  Marta picks up the rabbit, and with a sharp knife makes a deft slice up the creature’s furry belly. She skins it and cuts it up into small pieces which she tosses in the pan with some fat from the sausages, and some leaves of wood-garlic and wild thyme. A delicious aroma floats down the field. At the last moment, she throws in the fried sausages, ceps and potatoes, and adds a can of Vitaly’s beer to make a mouth-watering sauce. She tastes it on the tip of her tongue, and closes her eyes with sheer good-Polish-woman pleasure.

  Andriy and Emanuel have built a fire in a grassy spot at the top of the field. Although there is plenty of dry wood in the copse, and small
twigs for kindling, it still seems to take them a lot of huffing and puffing and flapping of branches to get it going. When it has caught, and the smoke has drifted away, they arrange a circle of logs and crates and the old car seat to sit on. The Chinese girls have set out the plates and cutlery (there are only six sets, so some people will have to share or improvise). Emanuel has picked a huge bowl of strawberries, and Marta sets them to marinate in cool tea, with sugar and some wild mint leaves. She finds she is increasingly having to modify or disguise the taste of the strawberries to make them more palatable to the pickers. These she will put into a bowl lined with slices of white bread, and this will be turned out onto a dish as a birthday pudding instead of a cake for Emanuel, of whom she is especially fond. There are no candles, but later there will be stars.

  Emanuel is watching as Tomasz tunes his guitar. Then Tomasz passes him the guitar and starts showing him some basic chords. Vitaly gets out his stash of lager and his cash box. Ciocia Yola has put on her clean mauve-ribbonned knickers from the washing line, a short frilly skirt and a low-cut blouse. No doubt this is all for her lover’s benefit. Marta doesn’t know what her aunt sees in the farmer. Dumpling, she calls him. He is more like a suet pudding. If you’re going to commit fornication with a man, you may as well choose one who is nice-looking. But no doubt God will forgive her. He’s good that way.

  Then Chinese Girl One bangs the side of a pan as though it were a gong, and they all take their places around the fire in anticipation of Malta’s feast.

  Down in the valley, a summery haze shimmers over the treetops and shadows are already gathering. The cut-crystal brilliance of the light becomes soft and muted, as though shining through layers of silk. The silver streamers of clouds have turned to pink, but the sky is still bright, and the sun has an hour or so to go before it touches the treetops. It is almost midsummer. A thrush sits on the branch of an ash tree in the copse, singing his heart out, and from the far side of the copse his mate calls back. It is the only sound to break the stillness, apart from the sound of a dog barking in the woods far away.