IV 29th August 1995
For a farmer who does not own a combine harvester the harvest becomes a lottery between despondency and joy in equal measure: it means on the one hand having the whole yearʼs work dependent on the goodwill and ability of another, and on the other seeing your trailers coming back from the fields, full of golden grain dry and healthy. We had a sturdy timber box made in London weighing 14 kilos, which holds exactly one tenth of a cubic meter, and enables us to calculate the weight of grain which varies between 700 and 800 kilos per cubic, as it varies between fields. It is of absorbing interest to know the difference between them, which is a commentary on our work and on the quality of the field. Knowing the volume of each trailer, we know the load being brought and stored. The water content, which has been checked before cutting, and the temperature of the grain are measured with an electronic meter because it needs to be below 15 % to avoid the danger of grain heating in storage. We had to change the combine service, not only because of the failure in cooperation of the team, who let us down, but also because of an incident which gave food for thought. When the combine returned early in the evening, I enquired if its tank had been emptied, which was taken as implying dishonesty. It is surprising how often the worst meaning is read as sub-text of a conversation. Whether there was dishonesty at the time, which their strong reaction perhaps implied, we did not deign to check the tank, but hard words were exchanged and a new team had to be found.
Despite the difficulty that ensued the work was finished and all fields were cleared and our grain was stored in the new silos. They store 45 tons and are made of galvanised steel built on heavy concrete bases, by specialists. The construction work took two days during which their team of five men had to be fed and lodged with care, by our village friends. At the end of the summer, to face a new programme a family-related management was appointed with T & J which, owing to the charm of the two persons involved, was a happy time if not always fully professional.
There is a sharp rise in the price of grain in Europe and Leszczynʼs first true harvest, total of 124 tons of wheat weighing 78 kg/m3, including six tons of spring wheat (somewhat lighter) stored in four silos, will now wait for the best price in the market. At a kilo a loaf, it represents 124,000 white wheat loaves, a considerable contribution to Western culture, which was based as much on wheat and white bread as on its knights. Wheat is a demanding crop - it requires field use to be rotated and to be left fallow at intervals - which can be done over winter with spring wheat. The community has always dignified the harvesting, reaping, milling, or baking with festivals, from which originated their songs and dances, making the farmerʼs endeavours a significant part of our culture. Our small celebration was muted, because of the death a few days earlier, of my cousin and oldest friend Janek.
Janek was a unique person, a man of deep culture and wide knowledge of every aspect of Polish history, who in his life had to overcome great difficulties, which he did with optimism and humour. He was gravely wounded in the Warsaw Uprising, shot through the head and was saved by a friend who threatened the doctor who wanted to abandon him with the dying. But he recovered and finished Law and later Economics, but his main love was writing, which he did with a light touch and a gift of expression enriched with knowledge of world history and traditions. He received a doctorate of Economics at Warsaw University and spent many years, researching and writing about alcoholism. Also a bon-vivant, we spent good times in Warsaw, Paris and London together, enjoying and talking over many issues. One day when meeting him at Liverpool Street station on his arrival from Warsaw, during the Papal Conclave, I remarked lightly “maybe Cardinal Wyszy?ski will be our next Pope” to which he replied “no, not him but Wojtyła maybe”, which came true a few days later; he knew him in Cracow in earlier years. A man of wide connections at every level of society and a stupendous letter writer. In later years, after establishment of democratic Poland, he was a Major-Domo of the Polish Parliament, as a Director of all Membersʼ services. Laughingly he informed me that we played as boys, in the same sand-pit, with the present Prime Minister, Mazowiecki. He had a fondest knowledge of every stone of Warsaw and a love of all aspects of her history and talked about it like a poet, like some do about London or Paris in the context of Western Culture. On his death there was a sense for me, and many others I believe, that this city became poorer.
At the same time as the harvest, we were proceeding with building of the big barn, which will also contains a flat and an office in the front section, and a barn behind. The structure is 25 m long, 12 m wide and 8.5 m high to the ridge; it will provide living accommodation on upper floor, main barn for storage and a cellar with boiler for central heating. Similar in a way to old German or Dutch farming tradition, where the same building contained a barn, a piggery, cows, horses, poultry and living quarters of the owner, though we are not planning an animal menagerie. The contract was agreed with a builder, on reasonable terms, but in true building tradition, it started to get out of hand with ʻextrasʼ how many times have I seen and coped with it in England and France - building will-out. We had to take it over at eaves level, and finish the walls and roof from wall-plate upwards by subcontracting, also the internal work with casual labour and small specialist firms. In building, various trades understand each other through their skills; to see an English carpenter or bricklayer work in France or a Polish or French one in England, sharing the hand-language of their skills, shows an understanding which is not national, but a phenomenon of European tradition.
Perhaps one can assert that Western beliefs tested over two thousand years are a rich setting for the development of personality and of human spirit. We see their expression in the man-made beauty and delight, at every step - on this badly drawn continent of Europe of many bays, islands, peninsulas and seas - shared from the Atlantic to the Urals. Seeing the differences between West and East, South and North, between influences of Rome or Constantinople, Protestant and Catholic, or contrasts between peoples and between their diets, tastes, or habits, we realise that God has blessed us humans with divisions and diversity to guard against hubris and staleness. In the end there is more uniting, than dividing us here.
We realise that springing from the genius of Greece, our beliefs became a cultural common ground which, sometimes shadowed by strife and neglect, blossomed in the Middle Ages into a brilliant view of man, culminating in the Renaissance. History has shown a stubborn growth of liberties, embodied in franchises, associations, trades or privileges, for small or large groups, sometimes mutually exclusive, but all struggling for freedom. It is enriched and protected by the gradual growth of common moral and ethical precepts, which struggle for justice in society and for liberty of the individual, with imagination springing from shared traditions.
Is this a false assessment of this Continent in the face of a century in which it nearly destroyed itself? The divisions before were caused by competition or greed but were retaining the common values, the divisions of today are more invidious posing a dichotomy and separability like never before which unless overcome can destroy our dignity and our freedom by proxy.
The question rises: can we force ourselves not to forget that there is Europe and its best expression the European Union leaving behind the false tempters of individual nationalisms which brought us low? Whatever our divisions we store our common Culture which unifies the land. Lets just listen for a moment to the sound of these names: we share our art of Raphael or Picasso, our literature, with Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, or Tolstoy, our philosophy of Plato, St Augustine to Machiavelli and Kant, our music of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Shostakovich or dances of Waltz and Polonaise, and Architecture of Gothic, Baroque, Gaudi, Corbusier and Aalto; our science of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin and Einstein; we share our revolutions - English, French and Russian - and thoughts of Bacon, Luther, Rienzi, or Marx and Gramsci. We also share our agriculture, whether on a corn field, or in a vineyard, and we share the sound of church bells, unique to this land and we share the loving and often nonsensical people. Quite a common terra firma: all that is certain is that a magnum ignotum of joy and fulfilment lies somewhere hidden here, but has to be found, for which we have to start digging now in One Europa.
