"Topophilia. Soustons." Soustons by Adaptor-Plug

Bastille Day Lunacy
In the Arena With A Red Shirt and A Bull.

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CAN YOUTHFUL SUMMER LIFE GET BETTER?

What a summer vacation that one was.

Hitchhiking from Nottingham to the rugby and farming heart of Southern France to take up seasonal farm work. It was an opportunity to do some Orwell, the chance to be some Hemmingway, and to have the both in the sunny homelands of Camus.

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 the maize plants that the farmer does not want to cop off with other maize plants. So only the right maize plants fertilise the others and create niblets to whet the appetite of the most fussiest Green Giant. Maize castrating.

Now. I offer no apologies for lifting Orwell's hop-picking narrative and Kent experiences near word for word - and written up so perfectly in "A Clergyman's Daughter".

I've edited in relevant words from Soustons that fit with Kent. Seems to work. Thnik of it as me duo'ing with Pavarotti at the Christmas karaoke.
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GEORGE ORWELL HOP PICKED. WE MAIZE CASTRATED.

"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 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 of Glasgow and Tyneside 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.) At half past five, pre dawn, we'd each feel a shaking frame 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, amid curses of “Debout ! Debout !” Having screamed himself hoarse Farmer Jacques would wait next to his trusty Citroen Van, his yellow smoker's fingers tapping on the hood.

"Ten minutes later twenty four youthful lads were packed like mackerel into the back of the van. We set out for the fields, many miles-and-a-half drive through the French lanes, with our heads throbbing and on the rare occasion we stopped for a poor soul to chunder out the back door. Some days needed a detour into Soustons town to pick up those that had not made it back to the camp the night before.

"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.

"The maize were divided up into horizon touching plantations the 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, this year 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 lined up alongside the rows and ordered to march, and castrate. Into the rows two feet apart each castrator advanced, in shorts, tee shirt, and at the start of the day a raincoat - to protect us from the chilly dew. Later the coats came off and silly little hats went on - to fend off the sun. Bare feet or wearing trainers, it did not matter on the sandy soil.

"Only the taller castrators 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 those ghosts in that baseball film that Kevin Costner bloke was in (slight deviation from George orwell there), when him and his wife lived in the middle of nowhere, forgotten the name of it, errrr, ummm, errrr, "They Will Come" was it? Yeah, that will do, we appeared like the ghosts from there. (And back to Orwell we go...) Hungover ghosts, quiet white shadows.

"Public embarrassments followed as the foremen would throw at any offending castrator’s feet the weakling maize heads that were missed or only half removed. These chastisements affected whether we were 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 wine plonk per hour in the field. Seven days a week. Not bad when totalled up over one and a half months. Enough to drink ourselves blind and sunburn our shoulders at the nearby beach.

"On bad days when the maize balls 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 weeds. It wasn’t their balls that got the lop. We aborted the whole damned thing.

"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, getting rat arsed.”

There. Orwell redone from hop picking to maize castrating. I hope he doesn't mind.
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Next.

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