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.