Sunnyfresh

I don't remember when I first started working on Sunnyfresh farm. I think I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I cycled there with the Morrisons, twin brothers, Sean and Gerard, and their younger brother Martin. It must have been late Autumn because it was still dark when we set off to begin work at eight o clock. I spent most of that first day digging.
Sunnyfresh was a tomato farm and at the time there were about three acres under glass. We started at eight and finished at six in the evening. I worked Saturdays during school term and then five days during the holidays.
It was interesting seeing the season develop, watching the two leaf seedlings grow to large fruit bearing plants. We were paid sixteen shillings per day, which in today's money would be a little less than a Euro. It kept me in pocket money and I even felt proud to be grown up enough to contribute to the family budget at home.
There was great cameraderie between the diverse range of employees. A lot of the men were elderly, small farmers, who worked there to supplement their income.  Others were younger men from the town. The work was hard, especially in the Summer when the weather was hot outside and very humid in the glasshouses themselves.
There were various jobs to be done, watering, weeding, de-leafing, removing sideshoots but mostly it is the picking of the fruit I remember. Racing to see who could get to the end of their path first. The tomatoes were picked when they were yellow-orange in colour and it was important to make sure the green calyx stayed on the  fruit. At the end of  a day's picking our hands  were green and the best thing to clean them was a squashed green tomato.  Even with  a lot of scrubbing our hands never came fully  clean and we were left, each evening, with a brown stain impregnated into our skin.  One of the perks,  was that we got to take home tomatoes any evening, not that many of us ate them, having looked at them all Summer.
The farm grew by another acre during my time there but when the oil crisis hit in the 1970s it nearly marked the end of the business. It was getting too expensive to heat the  glasshouses. There were three managers, an Irish man called Fred Duffy, an English man, Bill Dray and a Dutch man, Jan Moret. I think it was Duffy who got the  brainwave to buy up all the waste oil in garages. Mostly they got it free. It was collected in a truck and taken to the farm where it was passed through a long pipe that had a series of sieves or filters built ino it. When the oil came out the end it could be used to heat the glasshouses, for practically nothing. As time passed the managers discovered that they had a surplus so they began to sell it to other businesses. Soon they then realised there was more profit in selling this oil, than burning it, to grow tomatoes. Sunnyfresh was wound up and a national company, Atlas Oil was formed.
The site of Sunnyfresh Farm is now a housing estate and the ghosts of some of the former workers maybe wander through it occasionally.
Two of the lads, Sean and Gerard, that I started with that first morning have since passed on, but I have great memories of us learning to drive the old dumper and tractor and planning camping trips to Rosses Point. We told jokes planned our futures and discussed our favourite music and  clothes. Mostly we  talked about the girls we danced with at the weekend disco and wondered if any of them would be in the Mayfair Cafe that night.
I have especially warm memories of breakfasts with my father, Jerry, quietly eating porridge and drinking tea, while the rest of the house was asleep.
In all I suppose I worked there for about four years and I have always thought about growing my own tomatoes. This Summer I did. My small house of four plants grew well and the crop yielded lots of small, sweet cherry tomatoes. It is now the end of August and there are still a few trusses to be picked and enjoyed over the coming weeks.

  I also grew a few strawberries.

Opening Lines

Recently I came upon an article on famous opening lines.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
- Charles Dickens: A Tale Of Two Cities.

I was born in the year 1632, in the City of York, of a good family, tho' not of that city, my Father being a Foreigner of  Bremen, who settled first at Hull.
- Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again.
-Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent from London during the war because of the air-raids.
-C.S. Lewis: The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
-George Orwell: 1984

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book about the jungle called True Stories.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery: The Little Prince

Once Upon A Time.
-Author Unknown: 14th. Century

I remembered back to when striking mental images became clearly perceptible to me having listened to and read  a passage of writing. I must have been about thirteen and was in secondary school. My English teacher was a wonderful gentleman called Brendan O' Connor. He read short stories for us, from our text book, an anthology of short stories: Exploring English 1. The dull, uninteresting title belied the magic that was conjured up for  me, on the pages within its covers.
The sun, seemed always to stream in through the classroom windows, and flood the room with light as I listened to the vivid words of Irish writers like, Liam O' Flaherty, Frank O' Connor, Sean O' Faolain, Mary Lavin and Michael Mc Laverty .
I laughed at the uplifting humour in the story of  young Jackie's, First Confession.
I was amazed in the sad account of The Story of the Widow's Son, that there were two endings.
My favourite short story was The Wild Duck's Nest by Michael Mc Laverty.
It too, has a wonderful, opening sentence and continues....

The sun was setting, spilling gold light on the low western hills of Rathlin Island. A small boy walked jauntily along a hoof-printed path that wriggled between the folds of these hills and opened into a crater-like valley on the cliff-top. Presently he stopped as if remembering something, then suddenly he left the path, and began running up one of the hills. When he reached the top he was out of breath and stood watching streaks of light radiating from golden-edged clouds, the scene reminding him of a picture of the Transfiguration......

The enchantment of the story has always stayed with me, and I still appreciate the enjoyment I derived from hearing these tales. Some thirty five or so years after listening to the telling of The Wild Duck's Nest I boarded the ferry at Ballycastle on the north Antrim coast and travelled the six miles to Church Bay on Rathlin Island.

I have been enjoying visits to the islands off the coast of Ireland since.