The Stonies

 Every so often I take on a new plot of land for an allotment, or when I have moved house there is a new garden to tackle.  This may often include clearing ground.  Only once have I moved to fine tilth alluvium from river alluvium.

Almost inevitably I recall three very similar but distinct periods of my childhood and teens when I was faced with the ground already there and "something had to be done about it". The earliest was our garden, both front and back.  I was a young explorer, an archaeologist in training.  Perhaps five or six, rising eight.  I was interested in found objects; those discarded items on the farm which used to be. But I was encouraged by my parents to collect together ordinary stones, flints and chalky nodules and make a nice pile or two.  What for I had no idea, for the piles remained there, unused for many years.

By the time I was about twelve and moved school I had made friends nearby who lived in cottages on a nearby farm.  Their parents were employed on that farm, so while my home was on an ex-farm, their home was a tenanted property on their job.  There was something happening somewhere every day of the week, and occasionally I was encouraged to join in.  On one or two occasions I found myself in a group of several other teenagers of various ages including my friends.  At one edge of an irregularly shaped field had been collected a little pile of brown bags, a bit dirty and an occasional one with a hole at the bottom.  A potato Grubbing machine had worked its way through the field during the previous day, and here we all were on Saturday morning.  "Potatoes", shouted a man, pointing at the field while at the same time picking one up and demonstrating putting his potato in a bag tucked inside his belt.  "No stonies, got it?"  We got it, formed a loose line across the field edge, picked up our containers and walked back, always looking at the path already trodden, encouraged to pick up stray spuds.  As we slowly traversed our line there were murmurs of "don't they have machines for this?"  Naturally the retort was "you lot ARE the machines!"  And at the end of our session we received cold drinks – and a sixpence. The morning may have seemed long and arduous for a child, but we had a few pence in our pocket.

Two years later we became stone pickers.  Our new school had opened along The Ridgeway in Marshalswick, but the PE Department wasn't able to launch its games programme for us boys as the unimproved ground wasn't fit to have footballers and rugby players launching themselves across the marked out pitches even though there was a freshly emerging grass swathe.  A stoning machine should have been brought onto the site first, but presumably this was an expense too far; classes of children were much cheaper!

So on a few fine September mornings the timetable became "stonie" picking.  Each class appointed a bucket carrier – the classroom waste bin.  The teachers' roles were to ensure each class member produced a good supply of flint pebbles – especially the "sharpies".  The teachers also appointed one or two of the more burly boys to carry a rapidly filling bin to a pile close to the back gardens nearby.  The Head kept a tally of the number of filled bins being taken to the stone mountain.  There were shouts of "take your time" from classmates eager to take a break, but the Head, of course, reminded them that it is the class with the greatest number of full bins which would win the prize.

Suddenly, the vision of sixpences came into my mind from potato-picking days. But the encouragement about the prize was just that, and just an encouragement.  No actual prize was involved, then or at, for example an imminent assembly.  We, naturally gained the reward of working as a team, with the bonus of getting our school uniforms and shoes grubby.  Ah well.