Marina Lewycka - Two Caravans

“Love is like fire,” Mother used to say. “A treasure, not a toy.” Poor Mother, she is getting very middle-aged. Her mouth would pucker up in a disapproving lipsticky pout when we passed those girls on Kreshchatik wearing skirts that were just a little strip of cloth between their navels and their knickers, laughing with their mouths open as the boys splashed them with beer. Although it is more romantic if a girl saves herself for the one , still there was something unsettling, something knowing about those open-mouth smiles. What was it they knew and I didn’t? Maybe here in England, away from my mother’s prying eyes, I would be able to find out. Watching the ripple of that miner’s arms as he lifted the pallets of strawberries got me wondering about all that again. Just wondering, Mother. Nothing more .

There is a lay-by further up the lane that forks to Sherbury Down, sheltered by a row of poplars, from where you can look down over the field through a gap in the hedge. From this vantage point Mr Leapish the farmer sits in his Land Rover and surveys the rustic scene with satisfaction. The men, he observes, like to race each other along the strawberry rows, while the women are attentive to each other, and don’t want anyone to get left behind. Mr Leapish is mindful of this difference, and has given the men new rows to pick, while the women he assigns to go over the rows that have already been picked by the men. The women earn less, of course, but they are used to that where they come from, and they don’t complain. Thus by working with the grain of human nature, he maximises both productivity and yield. He is pleased with his skill as a manager.

Today is Saturday, pay day, and he will have to fork out for their wages later, so his mind is particularly focused on issues of arithmetic. Eight punnets per tray, half a kilo per punnet, eighty kilos per picker per day on average, six days a week, over a twelve-week season. His brain ticks over effortlessly in mental-arithmetic mode. When this field is picked out, they’ll move on to another one down in the valley, then back up here again after the plants have re-berried. Pickers are paidsop a kilo, before deductions. And each kilo sells at £2. Not bad. All in all, it’s not a bad little business, though he doesn’t make as much as that newcomer Tilley up the road with his acres of polytunnels. He could get more if he sold to the big supermarkets, but he doesn’t want the inspectors poking around in his caravans, or asking questions about the relationship between Wendy’s business and his business. The beauty of it is that half of what you fork out in wages you can claw back in living expenses. And he’s helping these poor souls make a bit of money that they could never get their hands on back where they come from. So that’s a bonus.

At one o’clock precisely, he will drive up to the gate and honk the horn and watch the strawberry-pickers pick up their laden trays of punnets and make their way down the field. He should really pick up the trays more often in the warm weather, and get the fruit into the cold store. That’s what you have to do to sell at £2.50 a kilo to the big supermarkets. But the local petrol stations that are his outlets don’t ask questions.

Maybe the Ukrainian boy will already be down there, waiting to open the gate. Keen. Good picker. Hard worker. Wish they were all like that. This new girl seems a bit of a dead loss, but maybe she’ll speed up a bit when she picks up the rhythm. Nice-looking, but not very forthcoming-at his age, he needs someone who knows what she’s doing to get the old motor started. Don’t know why Vulk sent her-he’d asked for another man. Now Vulk wants her back. Maybe he’ll put her to work in another of his little businesses. Well, he’ll have to see how she performs at the check-in. If she’s useless, he might have to let Vulk take her off his hands.

After the check-in he’ll let the poor souls have half an hour for lunch, which he has brought in the back of the Land Rover. As always, it’s sliced white bread, margarine and cheese slices. Today he’s particularly pleased because he’s found a new supplier that sells a white sliced loaf for ipp. He was paying 24p a loaf before. Eight loaves a day-two for breakfast, which they eat with jam, two for lunch, which they have with cheese slices, and four for dinner which they eat with sausages-over several weeks-it all adds up. The new girl is small, and he reckons she won’t eat much, so he hasn’t deemed it necessary to increase the provisions, except for an extra loaf of bread. This feeding regime, he has calculated, provides a perfectly balanced diet at minimum cost, with carbo-hydrate, protein, sugars and fats, all the essential energy-giving nutrients they need. The fruit-and-vegetable requirement is present in the strawberries, which they eat naturally during the course of the day, and which also help to keep them regular. Some farmers let their workers buy their own food, and don’t let them eat the strawberries, but Leapish reckons his system is more cost-effective. They soon get sick of the strawberries. Yes, even with the commission he pays Vulk for living expenses, he reckons he can still make on it.

Each worker pays £49 per week for food, including tea, milk, sugar and as many strawberries as they can eat (where else could you live like a lord for less than fifty quid a week?), and £50 per week rental for their caravan bunk, which in this part of the country and at the height of the summer holiday season is extremely reasonable. In fact maybe too reasonable. Maybe he should be charging £55. At least, in the men’s caravan. The women’s caravan, admittedly, is rather small. But it has a special place in his heart.

He looks at it, perched there at the top of the field like a fat white hen, and his eyes go a bit misty. This is the caravan that he and Wendy went off in for their honeymoon, more than twenty years ago-a Swift Silhouette, latest model, with bags of storage space, built-in furniture and fully equipped kitchenette complete with two neat gas rings, a miniature stainless-steel sink and drainer with a lift-off worktop, and a compact gas-powered fridge-how Wendy had loved it. That caravan park above the cliffs at Beachy Head. Spaghetti bolognese. A bottle of Piat d’Or. They had certainly given that fold-out double bed some hammer.

When they had gone into the strawberry business, seven years ago, Wendy had been in charge of the caravans. She had set up a separate company to provide the accommodation, food and transport for the pickers-that’s how you get round the red tape that restricts how much you can deduct from wages. This is what’s crippling the country, in his humble opinion-red tape-as though making a profit is a dirty word-he has twice written to the Kent Gazette about it. Yes, it had been more than a marriage, it had been a real partnership. Of course things were different now. Pity, really, but women are like that. Jealous bitches. Anyway, not his fault. What man wouldn’t do the same? No point in being sentimental about it. Yes, it was a good size for two people, could fit four at a pinch. Five? Well, they’d managed all right, hadn’t they? But the men’s caravan-it’s a static Everglade in pale green, the sort you can hire ready-sited in scores of windswept caravan parks on cliff tops overlooking the English Channel-that had once been an abode of great luxury, with ruched pink satin curtains and quilted velvet seats, now admittedly more brown than pink, and propped up on bricks since one of the wheels had gone missing. Probably those New Zealand sheep-shearers, though heavens only knows what they wanted a spare caravan wheel for. Acres of room in it. An extra £5 each-that would bring in £20 per week. He needn’t tell Vulk. And that would be £20 a week nearer to achieving his dream.