FROM THE ARCHIVES:The "Diary of a Farmer's Wife" by Ann Kennedy was a weekly feature of The Irish Times in the 1950s. This column reflected the growing mechanisation of farming. – JOE JOYCE
‘Mammy, come and look at the combine.” Margaret pulled eagerly at my skirt. “When Una has finished her dinner,” I answered firmly, with a stern glance at my eldest daughter who had just arrived home from school and was sitting balanced on the edge of a chair at the kitchen table, half-heartedly pushing food around her plate.
“I’m ready now,” she said a minute later, sliding from the chair. “Are you coming, Maria?” I asked, putting my head around the sitting room door. Maria raised her eyes from an English grammar and shook her head, shrinking further into the armchair drawn close to the fire. “It is cold, cold.”
The children raced ahead through the gate and, clambering quickly on a pile of bulging sacks, stood gazing down the field to where the combine was slowly turning. Up along the field it came, the roar of the engine growing steadily louder.
The children kept themselves warm by jumping from sack to sack, and I was firmly declining their invitation to prove my prowess when a car drove up and stopped beside us. A man got out and stood gazing at the combine with a feverish eagerness which spoke of fields of grain at a dangerous stage of ripeness. My husband had worn the same expression a few days before.
“How much has he to do here?” Having spent the morning answering the same inquiry, I was beginning to understand why the combine-owner, the most sought-after man in the countryside, preferred to do without a telephone. I spoke sympathetically to the farmer, for, with the harvester safely installed on our land he was no longer a rival. Then as the roar of the machine drowned our voices we stood watching as it drew alongside.
Dust and chaff whirled about in the breeze. Three heavy sacks of grain were cast off and thudded at our feet. Paddy, his face smeared with grime, grinned down at us from his perch on the bagging platform. Then, with a clanking of reels, the giant harvester moved on.
The bright sunshine suddenly faded, and I glanced at the sky. A dark cloud was rapidly eating up the blue. The men on the combine were all looking upward too, and anxiously we waited, hoping that our luck would hold, and that the shower would veer away to the right.
Relentlessly the rain swept over the fields, driven by the wind, and soon we felt the first stinging drops. Then came the full fury of the shower, and the combine came to a halt, the men leaped to the ground and raced for shelter.
Grasping the two children by the hand, I turned and ran for the shelter of the front door. Here we stood for a while watching the rain dancing on the gravel. Then I turned away sadly to put on a kettle. There would be plenty of time for refreshment before the work could begin again.
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