It’s October and I have an anniversary coming up. I think we all share a red letter day of this type. October is the birthday of me earning my first ever pay packet. Cue the John, Paul George and Ringo in my head: "It was twenty years ago today, Misssy joined the ranks of the underpaid...."
In this part of the world, that is, the Scottish part, I suspect that a lot of my compatriots share the same anniversary. For the October school holiday is also known as “The Tattie* Holidays”.
For those of you not aware of country ways (arrr!) and perhaps from non-potato growing regions of the planet (where do you get your chips?), the idea of a holiday in honour of the potato might seem a little strange. And if that were the truth, then yes, it would be a little strange. Kind of like Hawaii having a week off to celebrate the pineapple, or Germany having a local holiday in honour of the cabbage. But the Tattie Holidays are the opposite of what you might think. Yes, they are holidays from school, but they are holidays in which the children were traditionally released from the classroom in order to bring in the potato harvest. Perhaps, in days gone by, folk took their kids out of school for harvest anyway, and the school ended up just giving in and making it official. For many of the boys and girls of rural Aberdeenshire, the Tattie Holidays remain to this day, your first chance to earn some cash.
At fourteen years old, the idea of £10.50 a day for picking up some potatoes was too good for me to resist. It seemed like riches compared to my previous wage of £0.00 per day. I had calculated that if I worked the whole week, I’d be rolling in it and could spend my cash in my continuing quest to dress like the members of Duran Duran and follow them around the globe with a view to eventually marrying one of them.
Now, I’m no Tess of the Durbervilles by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought in my stupid hairsprayed head that working on a farm would be “quite nice”. I was wrong. It is a deeply unpleasant business. Especially for a fourteen year old whose only recorded manual labour up until this point has been tidying her room under extreme coercion by her parents, and filling the dishwasher once a week on Sunday to the soundtrack of the Top Forty Countdown.
To say I was ill prepared would be understating things. There I am on wet October morning, about to pick potatoes in a big field, but you can bet your Eighties arse I’m still going to be rocking those lycra infused Oddball stretch spray on jeans I’ve barely been out of since I bought them. Never mind that I can’t actually physically get out of them, I’m mainly wearing them because “lads from school might be there”.
I’d like to think that I was at least wearing wellies, but I can’t in all honesty tell you I wasn’t in fact wearing tukka boots or suede pumps with dainty bows on the toes. And as anyone who has ever worked on a farm, nay been in Scotland, in October will tell you; you need yer wellie boots.
So here’s how tattie picking works- the clue’s in the name. A tractor with a thingy attached goes up the field. The thingy digs over the ground exposing the tatties to the world, it is your job to pick them up. There we stand, with our own six meter square area to clear of tatties and put them in buckets. You've the time it takes for the tractor to come back down the field until we move on to the next dug section of earth to start over again. It’s physical work alright. In fact, it’s chain gang type work. Without the fetching striped jammies and ....erm, chains.
After a few lanes of tattie filled earth, I’m way behind. Ruddy faced men with meaty hands are shouting at me in frustration, as I claw my way in the earth, falling to my knees with tears in my eyes, vowing never to eat a potato ever again. I resemble Tim Robbins when he finally gets to the end of the shit tunnel in the Shawshank Redemption.
It’s the end of the first tattie picking day and I can barely move for exhaustion and muscle rippage. After the tractor deposits the trailer full of tattie howking** kids back at the pick up point, my dad has to chisel a hardened Misssy shaped mud sarcophagus off me before my Mum will let me in the house. I return home, at least with a little brown envelope containing £10.50. The hardest tenner I’ve ever earned. As well as the hardest fifty pence.
The next morning, Day Two of Tattie Week dawns and my dad gives me my wake up call.
But I will not be working the fields that day...or any other. Dad smirks and closes my bedroom door behind him and somewhere down the road a trailer trundles off to the potato farm without me on it.
(Can you remember how you made your first Dollar/Pound/Euro/Peso/Rouble? Delete as appropriate.)
* For overseas visitors tattie means potato. You knew that, right?
**Howk is Scottish for to pull up. you can even howk up your trousers if they are falling down.
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21 comments:
Working with tatties is synonymous with low pay and shit conditions. I myself worked on a tattie farm about 10 years ago when I was between jobs.
I have never worked so hard for so little money in my life. After your trailer of tatties was taken back to the farm they are fed in a massive grading machine, which is nothing more than a conveyor belt with the machine parts being several underpaid Polish people stooping at a painful angle to pick out the damaged ones. The conveyor then emptied into large wooden crates which held a tonne of spuds. It was my job to manhandle these one tonne crates.
I grew some new muscles on my muscles in that 2 months.
Tukka boots and stretch jeans. Oh my, the memories. Please tell me you didn't have the legwarmers on too?
Apart from babysitting (which I adored, since unlike my own wholesome home, all the houses where I babysat seemed to boast a sky dish and/or sega megadrive, and were stocked up with sugary, non-wholemeal snacks and fizzy drinks which would send me into a blissful e-number induced, beavis&butthead fuelled trance) my first job was in a jeans shop. And didn't I feel cool about it.
Jaggy: I would rather starve than do tattie picking again- it was the first job I had and it was the worst one, even 20 odd years on. It was also the shortest job.
Loth: I can honestly say I never had actual legwarmers. They hit around '82 and I lived in Brazil then. Not much call for them in those climes. Meeester claims he had some- but I'm hoping that's a joke (but fearing otherwise).
Bokker: Hello and Welcome to the Misssives. Maybe you sold me my jeans. Oddball stretch. The cat's (skin tight) pyjamas, they were.
Jaggy - If carrying boxes of potatoes made your arms get bigger, then I take it you must have been carrying a lot of stuff on your belly since then?
My first job involved delivering the local free newspaper, The Falkirk Advertiser, to 468 houses, so at 1p a paper I was literally coining it in to the tune of £4.68 a week.
Unfortunately almost every house was in a tenement block so by the end of my run I was a knackered wee boy.
You could buy loads of strawberry laces, a packet of hedgehog flavoured crisps and a can of Cremola Foam for £4.68 in the good old days.
Har har. I’ve actually heard of Tattie Day. I grew up on a farm in farm country and went to farm schools with other farm kids in Southern Ontario. We used to get a week off in February to go grape tying. This is a lot more pleasant than picking potatoes. You get a handful of twine, tuck it into a long piece of twine tied around your waist and stroll around a vineyard with your friends in the sunshine tucking some grape vines around wires and tying them down with the twine. – three spots for the bottom, big vines, two spots for the top, smaller vines. Move on to the next vine. The added bonus was that you were out in the sun all day so you’d get a nice face and hand tan. And you’d come out of the week with a pocketful of cash.
My first taste of capitalist exploitation was as a 50p an hour assistant in a general store/filling station at the weekends. That was so long ago that I used to put the petrol in the cars for the customers!
Missy, you may have chucked the tatties but I'm sure yer a fine wee tottie yourself!
Inchy: Like all seventies kids I was a big fan of Cremola Foam, but would never let my kids touch it now. However I have discovered that Berocca tablets have a similar taste and are good for you. (Esp. after a night on the lash)
XUP: You see I'm completely sold on the grape tying thing now. I can see me wearing a floaty skirt and carrying a woven basket, tending to the vines like the wife in the film "Jean de Florette". Yet, I bet you anything by lunchtime I'd be whining about cut fingers and repetitive strain injury.
Big Rab: 50p an hour. Man, that's harsh. And hey up until about 10 years ago there was a garage in Aberdeen that the man came out and put petrol in for you. It was unsettling.
LOL! I love this post! Cremola Foam! I ADORED the stuff.....can you still get it?? When I first left Scotland, I used to have my parentd send me the little tins in the post. Maybe I will need to try Berocca teblets....
And, just for information, the man in the petrol station in the villiage where I live, STILL comes out and puts the petrol in for you!!!
Nestle stopped making it in 1998, and looking at the ingredients I'm not surprised!
www.cremolafoam.co.uk
Inchy; That's because crack cocaine took over the market.
Never worked at tattie picking, but did both Strawberry and Grape picking, both a lot more strenuous than they sound!
My first paypacket has a story behind it as well, I shall have to blog it one day. But the short version is, in the kitchens at Michael Wood Services on the M5, lasted two days, had two bosses, one told me to do something, I did it, other one didn't want me to do it, they had a big shouty row with each other about it which they solved by sacking me.
I believe I made seven pounds an hour babysitting a ten year old when I was fourteen. Although I wasn't very responsible, I let the ten year old call up a psychic hot line at ten pounds a minute or summat! Needless to say I wasn't asked to sit again.
That would be on a building site Misssy, chopping copper piping all holiday to earn the £s to buy a turquoise duster coat from Miss Selfridge. Who, you might wonder paid so badly you had to work all summer to get a cheap coat? My Dad. He is Scottish. I may have had calluses a navvy would have been proud of, but the coat was fabulous. Manual labour made us the women we are Misssy - nothing the world of writing can throw at us holds any fear.
Being from Surrey, my first job was putting up marques in the grounds of unfeasibly large mansions of the super rich, for Tarquin's 18th or Chantelle's engagement.
The tent poles were the size of telephone masts and the canvas when wet weighed 100cwt. It was work for donkeys really.
My first efforts with a sledgehammer and 3 foot long pins were slightly Laurel and Hardy, in a non-Health & Safety Executive kind of a way.
Working as a dustman proved easier, and more lucrative.
Just me: I feel I have to issue a public health warning: Never snort cremola foam up your nose. I saw a friend do that. Unpleasant. For both the snorter and onlookers.
Alan: Blog it!
Emma: SEVEN pounds! Have you any idea how many potatoes I had to pick up before I reached that mark??
Kate: I sooo wanted a duster coat. I'm guessing we're in 1985 right?
MacBobo: If only video existed...
I promise I wont do anything with Cremola Foam that I shouldn't!!! LOL!
Stick to crack cocaine, it's a lot safer than Cremola Foam.
Just Me: In the words of Father Ted, "Careful now!"
Inchy: And easier to hide abut your person.
Ever picked rasps? Cut fingers, wasps and red juice that won't come off your fingers for days. Nightmare!
Perfect Prince: Hello and Welcome to The Misssives! I haven't and hope never to have to!
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