La Macchina Da Batt’ Pt.2

La Macchina Da Batt’ Pt.2 (Or, La Trebbiatrice).
Val D’Arda  Emilia Romagna. Circa  1972.
Part 2.


Cont.

So much for our safety briefing! However, in retrospect, I imagine that each and every one of the people involved in the day’s efforts did in fact keep a very close eye on us throughout.

La Macchina carries out three basic functions ;-  (1), to separate the grain heads from the straw stalks, (2), to separate the wheat from the chaff (the grain from the head)  and  (3), to deliver each of the processed elements to an external point where it can be collected and/or processed further. It accomplishes this task via a series of  blades,  flails, sieves, fans and shuttle trays.  It all sounds a little complicated I know, but essentially, the crop goes in at the top; the straw comes out at one end, the chaff and grain at the other.

The team of about twenty-five villagers aged from seven to seventy assumed their various positions around the beast and prepared to feed its eager appetite. As old man Casserai removed the one and only safety feature (he started the tractor’s engine), slowly the clutch was engaged and power transferred to the thresher, all the time increasing in speed up to it’s maximum revs (don’t ask me how many, I was just a kid). If I said that, the damn thing started to shake rattle and roll as the belt drives started to push the machine to its limit, that would be a gross understatement, because the wheels had to be chocked to stop it from making its own way back down the road. The sheaves started to appear from the barn each one being passed by hand along a human chain to the feed chute, where it became Il Piciotto’s (my kid brother) responsibility to place each sheaf onto the chute the right way up.  This was important because when the sheaf entered the machine, if incorrectly placed, once cut, the grain head would be sent to be baled and a small section of the straw would be threshed …. Not good.  Gradually the chain of hands built up a rhythm sufficient to satisfy La Macchina’s desires.  As the work continued the noise level grew to a point where it would have given the ‘voice of doom’ a run for it’s money and the cloud of dust that was  rapidly  rising into the atmosphere would if seen from a distance be sufficient to convince Gen Custer that the whole Great Sioux nation was on the move.






One of the many things that you tend not appreciate about a project such as this when you are young, is the complete sense of community amongst the villagers. With everybody mucking in to lend a hand to help their neighbour, no one moaning about who’s working less harder than who, just a complete sense of purpose toward getting the job done, knowing with absolute certainty that they in turn will apply a similar amount of sweat and labour to assist your family, when La Macchina comes around to you. Don’t get me wrong at any other time most of them would probably give you an argument about the relative merits of brown and white shelled eggs, but when it comes to the important things in life, like the success of a harvest, then it’s ‘Eh, Lads, Eh’ and it’s all hands together, old rivalries and disputes are quickly forgotten if only for a few days, when it comes to the survival of the your neighbour’s family and the village.

After what seemed and felt like a couple of hours worth of sheave shifting, we thought we would go and have a bash at the baler. The machine is comparatively simple, about the size of a small car, it has a series of wire tines set around a spinning drum which gathers in the straw at the back of the machine body, two inter meshing feed arms then sweep across the trapped straw and force it into a chute about 50cm square, where it is compacted by a hydraulic ram and passed over a pair of steel wires. The process is repeated over and over at great speed until the bale is of a set size (approx 1.5m), when the wires are mechanically tied off and the completed bale is pushed out of the rear of the machine. Now there’s not much skill involved here, just a requirement to keep the monster fed at a reasonably constant rate. Each armed with a pitchfork; we set off heaving straw, taking it in turns to place it in such a manner that the tines and the feed arms could grab the stalks but not us. We were kept supplied by a constant rain of ammunition from behind where the conveyor was delivering the materiel to us having first been deposited on the belt by the thresher. The baler is a nasty, vicious piece of kit that has no compassion for anything that it comes into contact with, it has one purpose in life, to compact anything that gets into its feed tray and push it out of the back pressed, packed and bound, ready to be stacked for future use as bedding in the stables. Two days later, we were given a sharp reminder of just how powerful this machine is, when one of our neighbours got his timing wrong and fed the baler his pitchfork. It became necessary for the machine to be partly dismantled, and from the  inside of which the fork’s handle was removed. The handle, a 5cm diameter, 2m long piece of seasoned Hickory wood, now in almost a dozen pieces and the fork’s metal head completely mangled. A more sobering message would be difficult to imagine.

The greatest hardship in working at the grain hopper end of  La Macchina, is the massive volume of dust generated by the chaff being ejected over the shoulders of those tasked to move the grain, an experience not dissimilar I should imagine, to that of standing in an arctic snowstorm, having the same discomfort and lack of vision but with the intolerable cold replaced by an unbearable heat. It takes about half an hour of threshing before the internal hoppers start to fill with grain, when they are ready, a small team of hefty blokes with arms like tree trunks, their faces covered with bandana style masks to prevent them from being choked by the dust line up with empty hessian sacks ready to have them filled with the precious cargo. Each hopper has a counter that measures the exact weight of grain processed and is capable of filling the sacks in preset volumes of 25, 50, & 75 kilo weights. As the grain starts to flow into the sacks a small shuttle service begins to operate from thresher to flatbed cart where each sack received, is tied off with twine and stacked ready to be transported to it’s storage point later in the day, and as one sack is loaded an empty one is given in exchange and the porter despatched to repeat the process. Now try as we might, even with one between the pair of us we couldn’t budge one of these often repaired sacks. I say sacks but in truth, it was difficult to tell sacking from repair, the patchwork of hessian, multicoloured cotton swatches and darning thread made one wonder exactly how long it had been since they could legitimately have been called sacks. But that didn’t stop us trying, we pushed, pulled, dragged and cajoled the damn thing toward the flatbed cart until some kind soul took pity on us and gave us a much needed helping hand, it was only much later in the evening that we were told that the first sack we had tried to move had been deliberately over filled, and while we were earning our first hernias, they were all having a quiet giggle.

We had been ‘working’ around the thresher having a go at just about everything, moving on to a new challenge each time that we became more interested in what was happening elsewhere. When without warning everything stopped; engines were shut down, drive belts started to slow, and for a split second, we looked at each other and wondered what it was that the other had broken and just how much trouble were we going to be in. In fact, we were so involved in the whole process we had failed to notice what time of day it was. It was of course, that most important hour of day that meant LUNCH, and although there appeared to be only a little more wheat to be processed, in Oneto lunch, means lunch and every thing stops regardless. Save for some cold water form the Fontana Fresca we had had nothing since our snatched breakfast and only now did we realise how hungry we were. Over the sound of the chatter we heard the shrill two-tone twin blasts of Nonno’s four finger whistle, he was calling us in for lunch. The thing about that whistle (two fingers inserted either side of the mouth to depress the tongue, and blow like buggery)  was, that you couldn’t escape from the damned thing, the shape of the valley in which our village stood meant that even if we were fishing on the other side of the Church, you could still hear his call, and when you couldn’t ….. someone else would and make sure that we got the message that “your grandfather’s whistling for you”,  in the local dialect, “Tuo Nonno Sifla”  and give us a boot in the general direction of home. This time though we were in a rush to get back as Nonna had promised us something special for lunch. 

                              


Nonna had within her culinary powers the ability as far as we were concerned to turn water into wine, and although it would have been quite easy for her to produce some magical Italian midday feast of the finest fresh produce and locally cured meats, ‘something special’ for us was nothing more than a simple plate of deep fried potatoes and Heinz beans, our favourite ‘chippibean’ as our friends called it and at any other time Nonna would usually have had a queue of local children standing outside hoping to be invited in to sample some of the exotic ‘foreign‘ offerings that they could smell emanating from the kitchen window; well as they say “ you can take the kid out of England but……..  However before any of that Nonna wouldn’t let us into the house until we had washed, scrubbed and scraped the combination of sweat, dirt and chaff from our extremities and we’d given each other a good brushing down with the spazzura (besom broom), I‘m told by a reliable source, that we had all the appearances of a couple of Fagin’s best urchins.. Both Nonno and Nonna insisted that we take some rest after lunch despite our protestations to the contrary, protests which only grew louder when we heard the machinery start up again. We watched as the dust began to rise once more as the activity increased around La Macchina, by late afternoon Nonno finally gave us the all clear to go and return to the fray, if only to silence the constant chorus of  “Is it time yet“?  … “Is it time yet”?

We ran back to help complete the threshing and after about a further 60 minutes effort the last sheaf was fed in to the machine, as were the heads and grain that had attempted to escape, but had been trapped on the tarpaulins that we had lain earlier. shortly after that the very last sack of grain of the day was deposited onto the flatbed . As Sig’ Casserai started to organise the dismantling of the thresher, prior to it being moved on to the next family’s barn the really heavy work could now begin.

What remained now was to re-stack the 200 or so straw bales into the barn which had previously stored the wheat sheaves , and to take the countless sacks of grain to a dry store, in this case the upper floor of this particular family’s home. Il Picciotto and myself  had to carry one of these bales between us, trust me when I say that you would find it hard to believe just how much a lump of compressed straw could weigh. Task done we hitched a ride on the back of the tractor up to the house where the grain was to be stored, and for once we were grateful that we were physically unable to help move the grain. Each sack had to be manhandled up three flights of stairs and tipped on to the terracotta tiled attic floor, the whole process took well into the evening, whereupon, once again as is the custom, all who had helped in the days labours (including ourselves) were invited to share in a meal of gargantuan proportions.

Finally with appetites satisfied, and thirsts quenched, those that were still awake conversed into the night discussing everything from Calcio to Caccia, but not wheat surprisingly enough.

Anybody would think that they didn’t have to do it all again tomorrow!

The People Of Oneto Val D'Arda c.1922

La Macchina Da Batt’ Pt.1

La Macchina Da Batt’ Pt.1 (Or, La Trebbiatrice).
Val D’Arda  Emilia Romagna. Circa  1972.
Part 1.



 
“Wake up! Wake up! Come on you two, shape yourselves! It’s here, it’s arrived“! cried Nonna, at some ungodly hour of the morning. And so it had, no, not Christmas, but the ‘Thresher‘, or as we knew it ‘La Macchina Da Batt’ (literally ’The Beating Machine’) it had turned up, and once again we (the author and his younger brother) had an opportunity to play our part in the life of the village, to join in and pretend that we could be contadini as well.

It had been but a few short weeks since we had helped to harvest the wheat crop, and like Christmas, ‘La Macchina’ comes but once a year, and on this late august morning our awakening was met not only with the sound of Nonna’s summons, and of bird song filtering it’s way into our consciousness via the open mesh covered window, but also, and for us, more importantly, the sound of mechanical mayhem making it’s way into the village.

The source of all this racket was Il Vecchio Casserai and his two sons Primo and Secondo (no! I’m not joking). Who were each bringing a piece of anxiously awaited heavy machinery into our village. The convoy consisted of; one large tractor to provide the power to the thresher, and two medium size tractors to drag the other machines into the village, including a baling machine to compact and bundle the waste straw and a conveyor system to either move the waste straw to the baler and/or raise the bulging sacks of grain to the upper floors of the various barns, however the centrepiece of it all was the giant ‘Macchina Da Batt‘. Unchanged in it’s appearance except for a few minor refinements since it’s invention at the turn of the century, it looks rather like a cross between an American covered wagon and a garden shed with a large turret mounted chute on top, made largely from wood with metal fixings, painted in a faded orange hue, and powered variously over the years by either a steam traction engine or as now, converted to run off a large (for the time) tractor.

L'Arrivo Della Trebbiatrice

We leapt out of bed in a flurry of sheets, feather duvets and pillows, narrowly avoiding sending the guzzunder flying (so called because it usually “goes under” the bed)  in our rush to get the first sighting of  La Macchina’s grand entrance. We arrived at the window in a heap of sprawling limbs and flesh both competing (ok, ok, we were scrapping) for the best vantage point, neither of us realising that we would get there quicker, if we stopped buggering about and got dressed instead. The multi coloured caravan of what to us seemed like oversized mechanical dinosaurs,  bumped, banged, clattered and creaked it’s way into position near the barn in readiness to start  the first of several days threshing in the village. Each family would have its grain harvest processed in turn, and each family would help the other with their threshing, a real community effort. Fees for the services provided by old man Casserai’s whirligig were rendered sometimes in cash but more often in kind, as a percentage of the total grain processed for each family.  If you have ever wondered what subsistence farming meant, then this would be a prime example.

Ablutions were performed at the speed it took to run past the wash stand and breakfast was taken at the run, as we dashed out of the house heading for the barn at the bottom of the hill, shouting our promises to Nonno that, ‘yes’ we would be careful, and ‘no‘ we wouldn‘t get in the way. We were of course suitably armed for the day’s events, hats and sun cream, de rigueur, and complete with Nonna’s by now standard admonition about keeping covered up, long trousers, because we can remember the myriad of scratches we picked up during the earlier harvesting, and not forgetting every little boy’s best friend when out on an adventure, his sheath knife …… because you never knew when you might have to save someone from a particularly vicious member of the genus fauna or, ….. cut them free from a runaway thresher.

We made it to the barn in time to see the machines being set up, and to be met with the Italian equivalent of “Bloody Hell, They‘re Here Again“.  In the centre was ‘La Macchina‘, it’s chute/conveyor in the process of being hand cranked into position near the barn doors, that done, the conveyor/elevator was positioned at the rear of the main unit to transport the waste straw a few metres to the baling machine which was next in line to be sited. At the opposite end of the thresher were the grain hoppers, and here is where a small tractor and trailer had been positioned, waiting patiently, ready to bear the weight of the separated wheat grain once it had been measured and dropped into 50Kg sacks, dozens and dozens of which were sitting in quiet anticipation on the end of the trailer, waiting for the rush of activity that would signal the start of the day‘s work.

Now that everything was in the correct place, we were told that we could help to connect the leviathan to its power source. This entailed attaching a series of large rubberised canvass drive belts and more modern PTO (Power Take Off) shafts to a series of sockets and drive wheels.  The belts were between 2 and 10 metres long, each one about 0.5cm thick and 15cm wide, the largest of which took three men to lift into position, the PTO’s being a much more modern appliance were that much easier to fit into their appropriate sockets.  All that remained for the setup was to check the baler’s wire supply spool  to ensure that there would be enough to complete today’s task (a job for an experienced eye), and to lay out a series of tarpaulins on the ground to catch any errant grains that might try and avoid the oncoming beating (a job for us). 

It would be appropriate I suppose to describe here the inner workings of this giant of early 20th century agricultural technology.  First, let me say that as an advertisement for The Health and Safety at Work Act 1972, this machine fails abjectly. No guard rails, no covers, no emergency stop button, … no nowt. In fact to the best of my recollection, the only advice we were given was: - (a).  To make sure that we ducked down low if we went under the drive belts, as at the speed at which they were moving we could easily lose a limb or even a head.  And (b).  That if  we were working on the baling machine, feeding the loose straw in with a fork, “don’t get dragged into the baler by the feeder arms ‘cause it’ll chew you to pieces, pack you up nice and neat, ruin a perfectly good bale of straw and shatter an expensive pitch fork, and we’ll need the fork again later”.

Cont.

Bringing In The Wheat Crop Pt. 2

Bringing In The Wheat Crop (Through Rose Coloured Spectacles).
Val D'Arda, Emilia Romagna. Circa 1972.
Part 2.

Cont.

We set off with Nonna’s counsel reminding us to keep our hats on in the sun, and the sort of enthusiasm only generated by kids who know that they’re in for a bit of a 'Beano', in twenty minutes we had cleared enough crops so that Bruno could make a start with the BCS Reaper. 

A BCS Mower/Reaper

This machine which has the appearance of a tricycle in reverse, was and is, a boon  for the smaller farms. It serves a multitude of uses, from being an oversized lawn mower to (with attachments) a crop reaper. It runs on benzina, (these days it’s diesel) and has no electric ignition, and so must be started by means of a pull cord; gears in neutral, set the choke, four turns of the rope round the pulley, and heave…. If you’ve got it right its fires into life with a very satisfying roar.  The crop reaper attachment  looks rather like a cross between the rear paddle wheel on a Mississippi river boat and a crab’s front claws and has two functions, to gather the wheat etc toward the cutting blades and then to tie the cut stalks into small sheaves.

Having given Bruno a few minutes head start, we then followed behind him as a group. The adults armed with pitch forks would gather the prepared sheaves and heave them up onto the trailer which only a few years earlier would have been drawn by bullocks, and now was being pulled by a Fiat tractor being driven by yet another cousin Romolo.

Now this all sounds very prosaic, but there is a certain amount of skill involved in lifting these bales on to a cart, especially as it becomes more heavily loaded. The observant would note that the bed of the cart has been lined with a large tarpaulin, this is to prevent any of the precious grain from falling through the cracks in the plank floor of the cart and being lost. At this stage of development the seed heads on the stalks are very fragile and therefore any rough handling  would mean losing valuable grain, so each sheaf would be speared in such a manner that it could be carried vertically to the trailer and then they would use a gentle sweeping motion to lift the bale of wheat onto the cart, where it would be stacked with all due care and deference. I’m sure you will appreciate, that although each sheaf weighed  only about 10 kilos,  taking turns to lift one of these to a height of between  1.5m and 5.0m every couple of minutes  all day, every day in the August sun until all the harvest is in, is no mean physical feat (or so it seemed to us).  Meanwhile my brother and I would continue our quest to gather all the stray wheat.

After an hour or so Nonna turned up with breakfast; fresh bread, cheese and flask of Nonno’s favourite morning pick-me-up, a deeply satisfying combination of milk (fresh from the cow), beaten raw eggs (fresh from the hens), lots of sugar, and a splash of Marsala, (protein and alcohol; if that doesn’t get you going in the morning, nothing will), and yet another reminder about our damned hats. And so it continued, sheaf, after sheaf, hour after hour, pausing only to wipe the fevered sweat from one’s brow or, for a drink of cold water drawn from the spring not 200metres away, followed swiftly by a quick dash behind the nearest bush for a “you know what”  and of course lunch, which came in the form of an Italian version of a ploughman’s panini, and a bottle of the local rough red and more cold spring water.

It seemed to us that we had never worked so hard, if that’s what you can call it, because all I remember is that we had a great deal of fun. With all the field now cut, where once was a stand of golden brown wheat that swayed and changed colour in time with the movement of the sun and wind, all that remains now is a vast expanse of small yellow straw stalks no higher than a  hedgehogs back. There we stood wet through with sweat, covered in our well earned battle scars of small scratches that we had picked up from the sharp cut edges of the straw, and immensely proud of our “achievements“.

Our reward for the days effort was a ride back to the village on the top of the cart carrying the day’s harvest , and two invitations, one, to share a grand evening meal with all of those involved in bringing in the crop, and the second from Morpheus, to join him in the sleep of the innocent.  Both of which we gladly accepted.  For the adults, the day was not yet concluded, as after dinner they had to unload the cart into the barn  and prepare for the following days exertions. However, for us, we had done our bit, had a damned good time doing it and compared our battle scars to establish future bragging rights to the days adventures.

As for tomorrow…. that’s another story, for another day.

Bringing In The Wheat Crop Pt.1

Bringing In The Wheat Crop (Through Rose Coloured Spectacles).
Val D'Arda, Emilia Romagna. Circa 1972.
Part 1.

It started as it had always started, for generations  previously, under a September sky, with a man, a plough, several tonnes of what we shall genteelly call “bovine fertiliser” and an open field, and so it will continue, largely unaltered, the only differences being in the change of motive power from human sweat and toil, through the harnessed animal muscle of the horses and the bullocks, to the modern combustion engine in the form of a 300 hose power Fiat tractor. The purpose, to prepare the soil for seeding.

Seed which once sown, will over the coming months have to survive the attentions of the local wildlife, both terrestrial  and avian, the ravages of a northern Italian winter and later, surging rain, driving winds and of course,  the baking Mediterranean sun. Which if it is lucky will combine in the right proportions to kick start it into life, if not it will remain dormant in the field where it lies and will rot. It will make its first appearance on the surface in the early spring as a tiny green shoot,  just one of tens of thousands  in the field, forcing its way upwards, through soil and past stone, looking, searching, reaching, for that life giving element that is the sun.  By late spring these seedlings have become dense enough to completely hide from view the bare earth  from which they burst, and now their fate lies with the sun, rain and old father time, who again must combine to produce by the late summer, the plant that will by then have become a field of gold and ochre stalks standing waist high to a grown man, whose  heads will contain both their own future and more importantly for the farmer, those tiny little golden brown jewels of wheat grain that are known to antiquity as the “staff of life“.

Wheat: The Staff Of Life

As with most things agricultural, events tend to work in cycles, it’s early August the sun has worked it’s magic, and the plants have matured.  He could leave it a week or two longer for the grain to bulk up a little more and increase the size of the harvest, but he runs the risk of a late summer storm which could quite easily knock the entire crop to the ground and ruin a year’s hopes in only a couple of hours, and so the “contadino” rises from his bed early; an important decision has been made, today’s the day to bring in the wheat crop.

Harvesting a crop of any description is an all hands to the pumps family affair, machinery has to be serviced, blades have to be sharpened, sacks have to be mended , and bailer twine has to be bought etc, etc. More than that, the farmer needs to marshal his team. Who drives the reaper?  Who drives the tractor?  Who cuts the wheat by hand in all those hard to get to places? (after all, fields are usually neither flat nor square).  But more importantly (and here enters the author and his younger brother), what to do with those two kids from England, who are as keen as mustard to muck in and help, but know bugger all about harvesting! 

At this point, I think I should add that, we always thought that we were helping, however on reflection the value of our help was probably extremely limited, but we were always welcomed and included in most of the activities. We were given lots of opportunities to ‘help’ (or, get in the way depending on your point of view) with the preparation of the machinery from the checking of oil and water levels, to the sharpening of the reciprocating blades on the BCS Reaper. This involved our ‘assisting’ our cousin Gianetto as he demonstrated his skills as a blacksmith by attending to every one of about fifty individual blades on the cutting bar. Each blade is inspected, checked for damage and either repaired and sharpened the old fashioned way on a rotary whetstone, which I have to say, was almost certainly an antique when my grandfather was a boy, or if too badly damaged, replaced with an all new blade, which would be hot riveted in place, and hence, we were responsible for keeping the forge at the correct temperature and we took it in turns to hand crank the bellows to keep the air flowing through the coals and the temperature up.  Now all of this preparatory work (at least we thought of it as work), was very hot very noisy and very, very dirty ……. HA, HA, HA, BLOODY MARVELLOUS isn’t it! 

And so the big day dawns, a light breeze passes over us, the sun has risen and we are set to work early on clearing a starting point in one corner of the field where the Bruno and his BCS Reaper can make a start. We are given a scythe, a sickle, and a ball of twine and some basic instruction in their use;  

Scythe

1. Keep the scythe flat and use a sweeping motion working from right to left.
2. Don’t try to cut too much in one sweep, let the scythe do the work.
3. Don’t cut more than can be bundled together into your arms to form a sheaf.
4. Use the twine to form each sheaf as you go along.
5. Make sure no one is standing too close, as the scythe will easily remove a foot once it is sharpened.
6. Use the sickle to cut any stalks where the  scythe can’t reach.

Cow Horn Whetstone Holder

Having received our instructions, Nonno who had come along to keep an eye on us, came over and sharpened the scythe. Imagine if you will the picture of a 70 year old man  his face and hands the map of his life, wearing an English flat cap (Tweed, of course)  a long sleeved white shirt,  black heavy cotton trousers, supported with the widest leather belt you have ever seen, black army surplus ammunition boots, and a match stick clenched firmly between his teeth.

Marass

Hanging from his  belt were two items that you would only rarely see him without.  One is a machete/ bill hook like tool known locally as a Marassa,  and a small  20cm/8in whetstone carried in a an adapted cow’s horn which also contained a small amount of water to help attain a proper razor like edge on the various cutting tools.  Imagine once again the picture of an elderly gent whose hand is now flashing before your eyes, complete with whetstone along a blade that is over a metre long with a dexterity and accuracy equalled only by some of the worlds great surgeons and chefs. 

Cont.