Walk softly, O man, past an acre of wheat
With awe in your heart and your face.
Walk humbly, O man, and with reverent feet,
For strength slumbers here - can't you feel its heart beat?
And beauty's own coach is an acre of wheat
And holiness dwells in this place.
- From the Ballad of an Irish Wheat Field.
Sixty years later I can see it now out of the corner of my mind's eye - that loaf of Irish soda bread which has been placed on the bread-board and put on the corner of our farmhouse kitchen table.
I see the beauty of it - its crustiness, with a deep slash down its centre and another across its width, making a cross; its look of wholeness; its smell - with my mother in the background dusting the flour from the tin in which she had baked it. Indeed, she had done more than that - there was the churn in the corner of the kitchen in which she had made the butter that now too has its place beside the loaf of bread, lovely golden fresh butter with a look, a smell equal to, but different from, that loaf of bread. And that wasn't all, for the buttermilk that was left behind in the churn after the butter had been formed had been used to mix the flour for the bread-making.
Good housekeeping
The scene was all of a piece. When we came in from the farm, cold and hungry, and saw loaf of bread, our plight was soon forgotten. It was a symbol of good housekeeping, a symbol of family life, a symbol of what the earth is here to produce.
In this age of our affluent society, the loaf of bread is taken for granted in many households. It is something that we don't want to be without, but as for making it ourselves, the general sentiment is: "Is it really worth the bother? Why, even the newsagent down the road now sells bread and I can pick it up when I get my morning paper."
It was not so in our family until many years later when we inevitably got caught up in the materialistic society. We were brought up to understand that if we wanted something, it was up to us to find a way of getting it by our own efforts. We didn't belong to the age that is consumed by the thought that if one has paid taxes all one's life ad worked hard, it is the duty of the State to provide a good pension. No, the thought never entered our minds. It was in our blood to work for what we needed, but the word "work" had a different connotation in those days. To work was a natural ingredient of the ability to grow up and become mature; it wasn't something that was separate from our being - it was something that we did as it was needed.
Of course, living in the heart of the country, we didn't have the distractions from living from within ourselves that town children did. There wasn't a shop within seven miles of our home, so we were not tempted to say, "Let's buy it." That loaf of bread that I now remember was a real part of me and not something that I took for granted and would go out and buy.
Wholesome meal
Since that long time ago I went to domestic science college, learned how to make scones, cakes, stews and how to cook fish. I learned how to present a wholesome meal to the family; but never has there been greater excitement, warmth and feeling of "rightness" than that created by the loaf of bread made by hands that were still in touch with the soil that was its source.
Our loaf had started its journey as wheat grown by my father, taken to a neighbouring farmer's water mill and ground into flour. As children we had sometimes been taken to see it unloaded in a heap on the mill floor and later into the mill to be ground between stones rotated by the water wheel. Great excitement! When my father, back home, lifted the sack of flour onto a pallet on the floor of the barn we felt proud that it was truly our flour - a part of us.
The greater part of the wheat which my father grew was taken by horse-pulled barge along the canal to the nearest town where there was a mill large enough to cope with it. To watch the lock gates being opened and shut was an inspiring spectacle to us youngsters. We often walked a little distance alongside the horse on the tow-path feeling that we were kings of the world.
Living earth
The loaf that I now remember was made from wholemeal flour without additives and from wheat grown by a man in touch with the living earth. If he occasionally used a fertiliser, he knew when enough was enough. I do not remember there ever having been sacks of fertiliser, such as we often see on our farms today, and I have no recollection of there having been pesticides stored in the barn. I have, however, a clear remembrance of a large barrel of black treacle in the corner of the yard. This was put on the cattle food. When no-one was looking we often turned on the tap, twisted the black treacle round our fingers and sucked it.
How could that crusty loaf compare with some of the concoctions that now go by the name of food? One is an extraction - a fragmentation - the other is whole: whole from its source, the seed, to its full growth and thence in its manufactured state to flour used by the baker who instinctively understood the meaning of wholeness.
We stray from the essence of life once we relinquish our responsibility for the life we have been given, leaving another to be responsible. We cut the cord that joins us to our beginning.
That loaf of bread stood sentinel to our wholeness.