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
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