POTATO PICKING
Gleaning was going out of fashion when I was a small boy. In any case, since ours was an oat crop, the small amount of straw and grain that could be picked from a field was only of use to a keeper of hens. A Biblical picture we had of gleaners has remained with me since early childhood as the sort of peaceful agriculture one's mind loves to visualise. If there is any scene quite like it today it is, perhaps, the work of potato picking on one of the rather stony little farms in the foothills of Wales, where mechanisation is minor and manual labour generally the lot of the people working the land. I watched potato picking yesterday. An aged woman and her son were doing it. Periodically the son walked a few yards behind a small mechanical digger and then he joined his mother grubbing with her hands to find potatoes which she placed in a can. It was such slow, back-aching work. Once in a while the woman straightened and brushed her hair from her eyes as she spoke to her son. A yellow sunlight was, on the field at the time and I felt an artist should have_ been there to set the scene on canvas. When I passed that way again at dusk I could see the couple making their way uphill to the farmhouseleaving the digger, the cans and two partly filled sacks as milestones - of their meagre progress.
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