Grapes of Rother
We suspect that many of our readers like a glass of wine – this is how it starts! CHRISTINE O’GARA shares her experience of grape-picking.
Bailey’s Job Agency on Hastings seafront was looking for grape pickers for the short season in September, so I signed up. Along with my niece, Maria, I turned up at Bailey’s at 6.30am to be matched up with a fellow picker with a car for the drive to Gusbourne’s vineyard in Appledore. Friendly Bailey’s staff Liz matched me and Maria with Parvan, a quiet bloke.
John Joe was put along with us, up front beside Parvan, with a map on his knee of where we were going. He talked the whole journey, telling Parvan how to drive: when to indicate and when not to and demanding he speed up. Parvan just looked at him blankly. Later I found out Parvan was from Sri Lanka, had only been in the country two months and could not speak English very well.
John Joe talked on, sharing his wisdom about the Ukraine war, Keir Starmer, Brexit, Tony Blair, Odessa, and magic mushrooms. He told us where to find them (two fields either side of the road near Winchelsea, it turned out). He also talked turkey, working via Bailey’s last season “in a forensic suit and mask, up to my knees in blood, shit and feathers”. The terrible reality of our Christmas dinner, I thought. He’d also once worked on the bins around Rye and described the lengths people go to to steal stuff from Paul McCartney’s rubbish.
John Joe then directed Parvan through a no-through road and out the other side and said straight-faced that he himself couldn’t drive at the moment as he’d had his licence revoked! Somehow, I managed to keep a straight face too.
At the vineyard, Jim welcomed us and gave out hi-vis vests – different colours depending on your role. I was a picker, which was yellow. Bucket-runners wore yellow and pink, tractor trailer staff wore only pink and permanent staff were in orange. They also had green first aid kits in a pouch strapped around their waists, plus walkie-talkies. To add to this rainbow, we were given red snippers, black gloves and two yellow or black buckets.
There must have been 200 of us. We were led across the main road to start picking pinot noir grapes. A trailer containing eight Portaloos followed along behind us, plus another trailer with washing facilities – huge containers of water, bottles of soap, blue rolls of paper towels and bins for rubbish.
We were split into two groups – either with Dragos or Alex, both Romanian and permanent staff. The grapes were beautiful – small and compact, purple/black and so juicy. Maria and I worked together, either side of the same vine, picking our bay clean and then moving on to the next empty bay. I sang to myself: ‘Never Mind’, a poignant Nanci Griffith song about fruit-pickers working their way across the USA, starting with the grapes in California. How appropriate the lyrics were – “I hear the grapes are falling from the vine.” And they were – it seemed to me a bumper crop.
While we picked, bucket-runners removed our full buckets, replacing them with empty ones; trailer staff emptied the buckets into large plastic containers on the trailer, and the tractor moved slowly along as the trailer filled up.
It was a beautiful day, that first Sunday, if a little windy. Sometimes, we had to walk a long way in order to get to the particular vines they wanted us to pick. Once, we walked across a large empty field, the soil pale brown and stony beneath our feet. I looked back to watch my fellow pickers still trailing across. I was reminded of that scene in the film Witness, where everyone comes together to build a barn, only we were much more colourfully dressed.
One time I was behind three blokes, one of them was John Joe, plus Joe, a young lad into his boxing, and an older guy with an eyebrow piercing. They chatted away, the older guy about his time working all hours in the City, taking drugs, working hard and playing hard – and now being stuck in a village out here.
“Ah well,” commiserated John Joe, “you’ve got all day for a wank!”
“I get someone to come in and do that for me!” the older guy replied and they all laughed, including me. It was like being stuck behind The Inbetweeners!
We were all ages, mostly older, some people in their 80s, a lot of retired and self-employed topping up their incomes. I met Christina, a make-up artist with no work at the time because of the writers’ strike; Michael, an IT guy, who divorced his wife just before Covid and moved from London to St Leonards, then fell back in love with her in lockdown and they are now together again; Joe, the boxer; another lad who was a semi-professional cyclist; artist Helen; a fireman working on his days off; another guy who worked for EDF at Dungeness.
I did four more days just like these, happy to be out in the open, feeling like I was a kibbutz volunteer again, that same sense of community – working together and eating together.
For my last day of picking, a Saturday, we worked late, until 5pm. Parvan and a fellow Sri Lankan pal of his wanted to get away quickly – as they had evening jobs to go to. I felt for them as I sat in the back of the car, tired and sticky, while their bosses rang them demanding to know where they were and why they were late. Parvan was working in a favourite restaurant of mine that very evening. Lucky me, who was just doing this for an extra bit of money and who could go home and put her feet up.
Now, when I open a bottle of red, I don’t just think of those purple/black, juicy grapes, I think of yellow and pink, orange and green, and red and black: all the people wearing those colours. After the harvest, we had an email from Gusbourne’s to say it had indeed been a bumper crop – the most they’ve ever picked at 490 tonnes. And they gave us a party one Thursday afternoon with wine (of course!), meat, cheese, olives, salad, crisps, chutney and bread. It was a great afternoon, topping what was overall a fun experience; I felt sad when it was over. Never mind; I can do it again next year.
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