After the first frosts of autumn, the reek of onions: eau de Bedfordshire. Six weeks after the pert green tops wrinkled to withering shades of orange and sagged to the ground like a deflated fire hose, the stink was rising but the plants were no nearer being picked. Swollen beetroot-red bulbs half-heaved from the soil, tempting greedy fingers to cup and pluck them out of the earth. Nobody had come to hoik them out. Why the delay?
A farmer by eye only, without rights or responsibilities, I’d followed these crops all growing season long. The adjoining white onion field had been harvested in dry September, rural mudlarks stealing in at dawn to glean the aftermath, one brazen fellow pedalling off with a full carrier bag on each handlebar.
The field beyond had had its potatoes lifted a while back. Judging by the still dark, moist, crumbly tilth it had been harrowed this very day, heavy metal combing out the clods.
A jay prospected in the nearest corner. Hopping two-footed with such a spring as if it were bouncing on a trampoline, it came down to cock its head to one side. Now it was all intense concentration, eyeing the disturbed ground. Peck and pause. Jump. Peck. Pause. Both bold and timid, it ignored me standing still at a respectful distance, then took fright at the rumble of an approaching light aircraft and flew, flashing its bye-bye white rump as it swooped into a belt of trees.
Far ahead, the ground scuffed up a snowstorm of gulls. The birds whirled and eddied over a rolling tractor, then sank down in its wake.
When I caught up with the tractor and its white attendants, the gulls had changed their behaviour, as if they had got wise to the futility of foraging. Now they were playing, painting themselves into a line behind the raking harrow, each bird landing and standing a wing width from its neighbour. Half a dozen peeled off from the back of the queue and led the rest to the centre of the field where they all huddled, a hundred strong, in a conspiratorial crush. I imagined gull chatter in old Sandy dialect: “Invertebrate numbers here en’t what they used to be.”
