Marina Lewycka - Two Caravans

Yes, although Mr Leapish is a practical man, he too has a dream. His dream is to cover this whole sweet south-sloping sun-bathed strawberry hillside with polytunnels.

At six o’clock the shadows were lengthening across the field. When the horn of the Land Rover sounded again down by the gate, I picked up my tray of strawberry punnets and carried it down to the prefab.

“How many you got, Irina?” asked Ciocia Yola, sticking her nose into my tray. OK, I admit I had only filled twelve trays all day. Marta had filled nineteen. Yola and the Chinese girls had filled twenty-five each-you should see the way they go at those berries. Anyway, they’re smaller than me, and they don’t have to bend so far. The men had filled fifteen trays each that afternoon, and another fifteen in the morning. Each tray carries about four kilos of strawberries. I could see the farmer was annoyed. His face was red and lumpy like a strawberry. Or maybe, according to Yola, like a testicle. Anyway, I kept my face absolutely expressionless as he told me that today I’d earned £14, barely enough to cover my expenses, and I was going to have to do better. He spoke slowly and very loudly, as though I was deaf as well as stupid, waving his hands about.

“NO GOOD. NO BLOODY GOOD. YOU’VE GOT TO PICK FASTER. ALL FILL UP. FULL. FULL.” He swept his arms wide, as if to embrace all his pathetic punnets. “DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

No, I didn’t understand-the shouting was flustering me.

“OTHERWISE YOU’RE DOWN THE ROAD.”

“Road?”

“ROAD. DOWN THE BLOODY ROAD. YOU GET IT?”

“I get blood on road?”

“NO, YOU SILLY COW, YOU GET ON THE ROAD!”

“I get silly cow on road?”

“OH! FORGET IT!”

He slammed my tray onto the pallet, dismissing me with both his hands in a way that was quite uncivilised. I could feel tears pricking at the back of my eyes, but I certainly wasn’t going to let him see that. Nor Yola, who was standing behind me in the queue with her full tray and her smug gap-tooth smile. And behind her was Andriy, gawping at me with a grin. Well, he could go to hell. Nonchalantly, I sauntered up the field to the women’s caravan and sat down on the step. They could all go to hell.

After a while, I heard the farmer’s Land Rover pull out of the gate and putter away down the lane. A pleasant stillness descended on the hillside. Even the birds were taking a break. The air was warm, and sweet with honeysuckle. An evening like this is a gift to be treasured, I thought, and I wasn’t going to let anything spoil it. The sky was pale and milky, with shining streamers of silvery clouds over in the west-a real English sky.

Vitaly and Andriy were relaxing on the back seat of Vitaly’s car enjoying a can of lager-apparently the rest of the car is disintegrating in a hedge somewhere on the Canterbury bypass. Typical Vitaly. Tomasz had disappeared into the next field to check his rabbit traps. Emanuel was sitting on a crate outside the men’s caravan with a bowl of strawberries beside him, writing a letter. The Chinese girls were curled up on Marta’s bunk, reading their horoscopes. Marta had already lit the gas under the pan of sausages, and our little cabin was filled with a smell that was both mouth-watering and disgusting at the same time. Yola was having a shower. I stretched out on her bunk just for a moment. I was feeling so tired, every muscle in my body was aching. I would just have a little rest before dinner.

I AM DOG I RUN I RUN I KILL RABBIT I EAT ALL I LICK BLOOD GOOD BLOOD MY BELLY IS FULL GOOD BELLY-FULL FEELING I FIND RIVER I DRINK GOOD WATER I DRINK SUN IS ON ME WARM I REST I LAY MY HEAD ON MY PAWS IN THE SUN I SLEEP I DREAM I DREAM OF KILLING I AM DOG

It is Marta’s belief that our daily food is a gift from God, to be prepared with reverence, and that eating together is a sacrament. For this reason she always tries her best to make a pleasing evening meal for the strawberry-pickers, but tonight is Emanuel’s eighteenth birthday and she has made a special effort to rise to the challenge of the unpromising ingredients provided by the farmer.

In the pan, the sausages have already turned bright pink and a greyish gelatinous fluid is oozing out of them and soaking into the bread, which Marta has cut up into strips and put to fry with the sausages and some potatoes that Vitaly found by the roadside. There are some wild ceps, and some green leaves of wood-garlic waiting at the side of the pan, which she will stir in at the last minute. The remainder of the bread she has pressed into dumplings with a sprinkling of mauve thyme-flowers and a pair of pigeon’s eggs which Tomasz found in the woods. They are boiling merrily in a pan. Marta is cooking up all the sausages-the men’s as well as the women’s. Why? Because Polish women are proper women, that’s why.

Ciocia Yola is taking a shower, preparing herself for another sinful night of love with the farmer. The sun must have warmed the water in the barrel to a pleasant temperature, for Ciocia Yola is singing as she rubs herself with perfumed soap, a tuneless wordless song. Ciocia Yola is not a good singer.

Then there is a tap-tapping on the side of the caravan and a man’s voice speaking in Polish. “Lovely ladies, I have here a small offering with which you may enhance our supper.” It is Tomasz, with the bloodied body of a rabbit in his hands. “Maybe the lovely Yola would accept this small token of my affection.”

“Leave it on the step, Tomek,” Ciocia Yola calls from the shower. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”

“Maybe you would like me to skin it for you?” He looks hopefully towards the shower. There are some holes in the plastic screen, but they are in the wrong places.

“It’s OK. You can leave it. I know how,” says Marta.

She takes the dead rabbit from him with a sigh, and strokes its fluffy fur. Poor little creature. But she has already worked out a nice recipe in her head to send it to the next world. Tomasz is still hovering on the doorstep, and a moment later is rewarded by the sight of Yola emerging, wrapped only in a towel.

“Go away, Tomek,” she says briskly. “Why are you hanging around here like a bad stink? We will tell you when dinner is ready.” He slopes off down the field.

In Marta’s opinion, her aunt would be better off with a decent serious chap like Tomasz, even if he does have some oddities, than with some of these ex-husbands and would-be husbands she seems to go for. But Ciocia Yola has her own ideas about men, as about everything else.

Marta picks up the rabbit, and with a sharp knife makes a deft slice up the creature’s furry belly. She skins it and cuts it up into small pieces which she tosses in the pan with some fat from the sausages, and some leaves of wood-garlic and wild thyme. A delicious aroma floats down the field. At the last moment, she throws in the fried sausages, ceps and potatoes, and adds a can of Vitaly’s beer to make a mouth-watering sauce. She tastes it on the tip of her tongue, and closes her eyes with sheer good-Polish-woman pleasure.

Andriy and Emanuel have built a fire in a grassy spot at the top of the field. Although there is plenty of dry wood in the copse, and small twigs for kindling, it still seems to take them a lot of huffing and puffing and flapping of branches to get it going. When it has caught, and the smoke has drifted away, they arrange a circle of logs and crates and the old car seat to sit on. The Chinese girls have set out the plates and cutlery (there are only six sets, so some people will have to share or improvise). Emanuel has picked a huge bowl of strawberries, and Marta sets them to marinate in cool tea, with sugar and some wild mint leaves. She finds she is increasingly having to modify or disguise the taste of the strawberries to make them more palatable to the pickers. These she will put into a bowl lined with slices of white bread, and this will be turned out onto a dish as a birthday pudding instead of a cake for Emanuel, of whom she is especially fond. There are no candles, but later there will be stars.