Dreel

dree (Scot.), vt endure, suffer.

dreel (Scot.), n drill, space between the rows in Strathmore raspberry plantations [field of dreams?]

The word dreel is filtered through dreams and memory changing mechanisms.  First, you can try saying the word, hard and short, incomprehensible to an outsider, and unknown to those who should know better.  Realists might correspond the shortness of the word with a bluff denial that it is anything more than a Scots form of ‘drill’; but if that was the beginning of the meaning,  then it’s  gone far beyond that for me.

    For me the dreel defines the sides of summer trenches, a wall of living green vegetation  starred with scarlet fruit.   I watch it move with the wind and the effects of unseen hands on either side, pulling the purple berries.  It even seems to shift (but never in sympathy) with the voices of the fruit pickers, alive to raucous laughter and appalling cursing.

    For the bairn stuck in the eternally muddied ditch between fruit plants, it is a narrow land of crowded noise and insects, ignored by adults who were intent on picking and earning, but cruelly under the attention of the beating sun.  The first brutal recollection at the berries is being unashamedly bewildered in this surreal trench war landscape.  I wore a metal bucket on my head, not as an outrageous fashion statement, but carefully placed there by an unkindly berry picker who wanted to silence me - and in retaliation I screamed until I was raspberry coloured myself.  Today some people are amazed, or say they are, if you tell them it was like this:  one bare generation ago, men and women waiting at dawn for death-trap vans, buses and lorries to take them to the fruit fields.  No golden sun-up, but dressed in worst clothes, sullen and ready for hard toil. And the uncomfortable journey might be the best part of an hour out of the city before the farms were reached. 

    I remember one incident hardly more believable than the scant outline above.  It was at the tail end of my time in my home town, and it was my attempt to be sleekit that proved my downfall.  Out of an amusing dread of being recognized as a fruit picker I avoided the local pick up points, and before dark I scurried over to another neighbourhood and waited among strangers to be picked up.  Apart from the personal paranoia you had the fear that on the bus or behind the bush might be a ubiquitous bogey man Benefits Officer; the DHSS notoriously laying in wait to steal the meagre illicit earnings from working people. 

    Nobody talked to me on the shockingly jolting journey, sitting on the benches on the back of a truck, and I was prepared and relieved.  I was among old couples who could pick rasps like berserk steam machines.  And there were women hardened by factories who would have considered me a poor specimen if they had deigned to leave off their obscene conversation to scrutinize me, which they thank Christ didn’t.  There were also family troupes ragged as refugees from The Grapes of Wrath, ready to work like galley slaves, mothers, fathers, monkey faced bairns and all, with six curled pieces and one bottle of curdled lemonade between them for dinner time. 

    We got off at some baked earth farm and beyond the embarkation point the dreels waved off in forty parallel green lines from the flattened seabed field, northwards for half a mile.  On the crest of the hill there was a sensed sudden drop off.  I imagined the sudden eruption of mountains behind.  To the south the field was abruptly curtailed by a disreputable black wood.  The straggle at the drop off was a congealed mess of folk.  Five or six small vehicles dropped off at the same time as us, and I was glad that the claustrophobia was diluted by strangers.  The  atmosphere was refugee, people milling, jostling for the paramount dreels.   A flatbed truck was set up by the teuchtars, with blood stained scales to weigh the harvest.  Yellow plastic punnets,  sadly disassembled, had been ground into the mud and had baked hard.  But today was lucky:   a farm tractor appeared and disgorged  a shitload of buckets.

    Buckets were better than punnets because the berries could be picked less reverentially; fruit could be compressed for speed, put in the buckets with disdain, as it was destined for dye and other arcane purposes, not for genteel, wanky fruit aficionados.  To make up bucket weight, you could piss in it or intrude small stones if you were disposed to cynicism.

   Word spread that the bushes were hingin’, the crop uniformly good, so there was no struggle for territory.  I took a bucket and some luggies to tie around my waist with hairy string and went to the assigned place, and assimilated through the grapevine the paltry price being paid per pound today.  So I swore but was overheard by a farmhand, a big middle aged Englishman who stared at me, then relaxed and smiled and said,

    ‘You won’t have to be doing this all your life, pal.  You’re young enough yet.’

   The sun was pounding, even this early.  It was going to scold, blistering  arms and backs of necks, making the going sluggish and all activities outside the picking extraneous.  I had a baseball hat to be worn backwards, to fend it off.  Behind me was a thin older wifey who I knew would ravish the dreel like a dervish and be assigned another lane by midday. 

    On the other side of the dreel was a stranger, which presented problems.  You were supposed to pick opposite someone you knew, probably to stop them stealing your berries, because, though the bushes were thick, hands could still poke through and pilfer what was rightfully your prey.  My oppo was unknown; I had not paid attention to see when I entered the dreel.  It was hopefully someone from my lorry. 

    God forbid, it was possibly some far flung Glaswegian or even a Fifer.  The latter had to be watched because they were ‘fly’.  Only the Tinkers who hoached around Blair and Coupar were regarded more cautiously, and you left them well alone.

    I was glad the unseen mirror man kept its mouth shut.  I got stuck into the bushes, which seemed about seven feet tall and cut me off from the rest of the field.  Soon the mechanical motion of picking engineered a daze.  All sound was dulled and dreamlike.  Above all was a wash of the bushes bent down, skin brushing leaves, the sluggish sea sound movement.  Maybe first thing you got a buzz of insects stirring in the morning; later the bass drone of bees; when you got home at night you found  secret forkie-tails, earwigs and all sorts of crawlers evacuated from your clothes.

    Beyond the immediate field, there were punctuations of human presence,  such as bored bairns screaming in wonder what they were doing there.  There were deep secrets conversation exchanged out of earshot across the field in this maze of raspberry land, and there was also idiot communications in the ether, territorial city taunts and superfluous reports about their picking prowess.

    ‘Bloody shut up, you Beechwood bastards.’

    ‘Up your arse, Whitfield scum rats.’

    Carry on through the afternoon, hands blurred, fingers scratched, soon to be dyed deep vermillion that only scrubbing with bleach would remove.  There were no distractions and soon all the luggies were full, then the pulp transferred to the bucket concealed in the undergrowth in case any swine would steal it, squashing down the fruit with your boot.

    No real thought arose for two hours, which was a blessed relief.  Then I had a memory, from the previous season.  We had gone picking in the Carse of Gowrie, working like termites in horrible mud and filth, pulling down miserly rasps from thin scanty bushes.  And across the road at the bottom of the field there was a wooden fence and a Pictish stone with its broken spear sadly pointing at us, and that unknown death creature of mythology with its knowing smirk that knew all about our blood.  Past that protective slab there were a group of idle, laughing slobs laying in a teenage idyll on the grass, looking at us, and they were inmates of the Borstal over the wall.  Great, I thought, this could be the whole symbol for my life.

    It came back to me then, unwanted, breaking my picking rhythm.  So I stopped and I swore aloud and somebody cackled on the other side.  The bushes had been swaying for some time in an exaggerated fashion.  Maybe the weird alchemy of motion had forced the recollection which made me stop.

    ‘How are ye doing over there?’ I said coldly.

    ‘Two buckets o blood and going for the third.’ it said obliquely.

    I did not like the sound of it, so I said nothing else.  Then he whistled and my hackles went up and I swore, and he laughed again, then whistled louder, and I countered with more subdued obscenity.

    ‘You shouldna be let oot on yer own,’ he said.  ‘I ken that ye’re shakin, laddie.’

    ‘Why don’t you go away and fiddle with some sheep, cos that’s what you sound like.  The only weight in your bucket is shit.’

     That was too much.  He bellowed like an Angus bull and chucked his bucket.

     I thought I  had the upper hand because the rasps were too densely planted for him to break through, and as we were in the middle of the dreel, I would have plenty of time to escape if he charged down to the end of his own dreel and then ran up mine.  This conundrum also occurred to him shortly.  After an extended rustling on the other side of the hedge, which I suppose signified dissipating rage, he unruffled himself.

    ‘No many people would dare speak to me like that,’ he warned.

    I didn’t answer, but I had a vision:  a big loudmouth fool holding sway over an audience of dunder-heads in his local pub.  But the voice, once it was calm, took on a worrying soothing and confidential sheen, like molten butterscotch.

    ‘Do ye want to ken a secret?’ he said, slyly.  I mumbled I was okay just now for secrets, thanks, and tried to work away up the dreel at higher speed.  I hummed to myself, and it mixed in with the insects buzzing and the greater human drone of the field.  The stranger spoke again about five minutes later, but when I throw back no response he was peevishly silent for a long time.

    As you do in the fields sometimes, I had long waking visions.  Maybe it was the monotony or some chemical released by the ruptured fruit, but the day dreams were elemental, blood red like the berries.  I dreamt I was dead and forced to labour forever in the purgatory of the fields.  Then came a nasty vision of confinement in dreels that stretched on forever to horizons without a break.

    I thought about some years ago when I had been on another berry bus with my dad and we passed through Meigle, rattling away, and someone said something tangentially about the Pictish stones there.  And I had the oddset precognition about some close connection I would have in the future with the relics.

    I heard them in their lulls going for dinner and decided I wouldn’t join them.  I was not a communal soul then, and I was committed that day to earning as much as I could that could be transmogrified into pints of heavy.  So, on I went, while the murmur rose as the chatter swelled and I unfurled my upturned beef paste Mothers Pride sandwiches and ate them while still picking, swigging down warm and flat Merimate juice from a plastic bottle.

    Now I had the obscene notion that I was swelling in the ocean of that bloody red fruit that was fed on all the historic gore of Gowrie’s under-earth world. Any witness, by my sweat, would laughed at the mad suffering.  When I pulled myself together the voice arose from over the hedge and made me feel worse again.

    ‘There’s twa o  them,’ he said, ‘in the space of ae season.  Ane faas in the waater whar the man was claimed twice.  And the younger will water the earth.’

    Oh ye bugger, I thought, as my own little crystal world of thought was shattered.  But there was force in his pronouncement that could have been congratulated, if I had the nerve, because it was unlike the previous creepy manic tone.  There was a wee bit of mastery in there, the triumph of presentiment over reason.  And it was poetry of the baffling sort that leaves an impression on wind affected flesh, the sense not reaching the mind, until the after taste is realised later.

    Yeah, well-done, good effort, my man.  Goodnight, my weird wee man.  I especially liked your overly dramatic flourish of throwing down the berry bucket:  bloody crang!         Perhaps he had literally kicked the bucket.  But no, the bushes gave an almighty rustle and were agitated in a furious manner in a direction heading thankfully away from me. I laughed and thought good riddance and stopped picking and listened acutely for a while.  Then I became very bold and ferreted up and down the dreel, looking for an adequate gap. I soon found it and squirreled through.

      He was away.  The bucket was symbolically overturned and the pulp of the bright fruit was say in a compressed scarlet mass, the juice bleeding away into the earth.  And the acid smell of it was sharp on my senses.  I was tempted to scoop up the squashed berries and add them to my own, but I felt that this would be tainted somehow.  Back I went to my own alley and stayed there, picking meagrely all afternoon, until it was weighing up time.

   My day’s work earned a sum which I am too ashamed to admit.   Soon I found the truck and was reunited with the fellow passengers, who were shocked to see how much I missed their company.  The vehicle had moved to the other side of the farm and in the wrong direction.  All the others were in the usual place, and we felt singled out for an unknown reason.

    There was a long, un-talking walk down a tree lined road, past the screened off farmhouse, complete with smells of baking, pig dung, and the low satanic mockery of chickens.  Then, before the main exit there was a courtyard.  It was a spotlight moment, one of those unfamiliar instances where you freeze in an unfamiliar environment and it takes longer than usual to calculate your bearings.  I expected something dramatic, but the only ambush transpired to be a fruit stall.  There the farmer’s daughter brazenly displayed the berries we had just picked, neatly packaged in wee neat straw nests, selling for ten times what we had been paid for picking them.

    And she smiled broadly, with no shame at the outrageous show of commerce in defiance of us.  I was embarrassed, but the others were open in their displeasure, and behind their vocal taunts, rising above the bloody farmyard babel, there was a hate that cut the evening like a scalpel.  Beyond the building there was the second sister, more lissome, oblivious and disparaging of us, executing meaningless circles on her horse.

    Some of the men made loud crude remarks as they stared after her.  The women would have spat if they were in reach.  The whole scene seemed to have been fermented to show us the fruits of our labour, and that no matter what we did, these people would always occupy the summit of the manure pile.  I felt summer sick and relapsed into half dreams on the truck going home.   

    That night the berry stains were impervious to the bleach.  The scratches from the bushes were black and ugly.  I went out drinking anyway and aped at having a good time.  But by ten I abandoned my friends and tried to get home.  In the end I shared a taxi with three middle aged women going the same way.  One of them professed super cognitive powers and assured me that I would  be ‘very lucky’ one day (and if I could go back in time, I would skelp her face on that account).

    As I was leaving the taxi and waving goodbye with relief, she leant forward and said, ‘Never mind, ye couldn’t have stopped