Hay ho . . . it's another silage summer in the heroic old sod
THERE is a hinge to every summer. It is whether farmers have been able to save the hay, for otherwise, there must be silage. These are two different worlds -- for the hay summer is a dry summer, celebrated by poets, larks and swallows; but the silage summer is a summer of mud and muck, the source of rural resignation, as we once again round the seasonal bend towards autumn.
Words can tell you a lot. In England, hay is made: Ireland, it is saved. The word "hay" shares its roots with the word "hew", which means "cut". And the summer routine in the land from which we take our language is to harvest the long grass by blade, at which point, it instantly becomes hay.
But in Ireland, with a climate as unrelated to the greengage summers of Mercia and Wessex as they themselves are to that of Provence, cultivating grass is an altogether problematical affair. To take it as we really want it, as hay, means we must rescue it in the dry breaks between the usual sieges of rain. If not saved dry, it must be harvested wet, and allowed to ferment in the modern equivalent of the ancient Greek siros, literally "hole in the ground", from which we ultimately take our modern word "silage".
Hay is a thoroughly virtuous food, from its meadowland days of long grasses and wildflowers, clovers and vetches: the bee-loud glade of Yeats's imagination. Thus the perfect summer, with the meadowlands rich in humming insects and busy birds, the rural idyll of the urban imagination.
Moreover, "hay-making" in English folklore is associated with revelry: making hay while the sun shines is a cheerful metaphor, and is far removed from the sodden drudgery of silage-making in Ireland. It is surely no coincidence that Irish usually has just the one word for both grass and hay, féar. To the English verbal mind, the two are as related as hops are to beer.
We now know the truth about this summer. The grass was still soaking as it was hurriedly taken last week before the great storms engulfed us, and it is now bound for the moist and airless hell of the silage-pit, where it will bubble and ferment, and sweat noxious liquors. The remaining ungathered grasslands will probably be watched until they are dry enough to harvest. For unless there is some miracle, the great machines will not this summer be scything dry grass by headlight through the night, bound for baling as dry-hay.
This is to be an almost hayless season, a silage summer yet again, as the fond hopes of spring have again been dashed by the inescapable truths of our meridian.
Our fields are marshlands, and the grasses grow rank and brown where, still uncut, they lie in swathes, flattened by wind and waterfall.
In a way, hay is the crop which symbolises so many of the differences between Ireland and England. If Ireland were not the meteorological gatekeeper for England, breaking the back of the Atlantic storms before allowing them finally to pass on, much weakened, why, Shropshire might be more like Leitrim, and East Anglia more like Meath.
OUR geographical heroism knows no bounds: and equally, it certainly knows no gratitude from our eastern neighbours, who so benefit from our vigilant guardianship of their western shores.
Moreover, the proximity which led to Ireland -- albeit, unwillingly -- becoming an English-speaking nation, also daily torments us with visions of a weather world that is not ours.
For it is now that English summer sports reach their peak: and we can see on our television screens, golf, tennis and cricket played under perfect blue skies, while our windows shudder from the gales outside, and rain pours in grey torrents from asphalt skies.
"Another scorching day in the south-east," beams the cheerful, shirt-clad weatherman on the BBC, "with temperatures in the high 20s, and even higher down here in Kent. Not quite so fine here in the north west of England, though still fine," as he gestures towards Cumbria, "but a quite different picture up here in Northern Ireland."
AND his trembling hand waves querulously at the truncated map of the uppermost part of this island, as if there were neither land below it, nor any weather there to keep it company. Here be meteorological dragons indeed, to be dealt with decent haste, lest they scare the children of England, and curdle the milk: dark clouds, and heavy rains, and wild Atlantic gales. Somewhere in the middle of the Irish Sea, the forecaster's hand has passed over some Great Divide between weathers and ways, almost like the mighty but invisible fault-line that marks the boundaries of Greek and Roman rites. It is beyond our power to remedy: it was, and remains, ever thus.
We speak the language of Hereward and Alfred, but live in the land of Columbanus and Brian.
It is almost the defining paradox of Ireland: and if we ever needed to be reminded of it, the morose and hayless grasslands of July can far too often be relied on to do that melancholy duty for us.
kmyers@independent.ie
