Ben David Trigg

When you pick grapes by hand, you have to watch out for the secateurs, and you’ll probably end up with a plaster or two on your left thumb anyway. They’re kept sharp, and they get covered in sugary sap from the vines and the grapes, so a cut to your skin can be a fiddle to clean out. You work your way methodically along a vine, thinking you’ve got this sorted, until your mind wanders just a little, and you slip a little close to the skin.

When you pick grapes by hand, you also have to watch out for the bugs. Big creepy-crawlies like to hide in the shade of the vine leaves, and I dare say some of them don’t mind eating the grapes too. I got a fright once when a red spider scuttled over a bunch of grapes I had in my hand, poised to throw in the bucket. Frozen, I yelped.

‘What is it?’ Mick yelled from the next row.

‘A red spider!’ I exclaimed, like Mick might never have seen one before. (I was such a teenager.)

‘Oh chuck it in. It all adds to the flavour,’ he chuckled. I wiped my brow, tried to flick the spider off anyway, and cautiously threw the bunch of grapes into the bucket.

When you pick grapes by hand, you have a bucket which you take along the row until it’s nearly overflowing, which you then carry along the rows until you find the person with the hod. The hod is like a giant bucket, strapped to the back of a man, into which all your buckets of grape-bunches are thrown. When the hod is full, he will traipse to the truck, with its open trailer, and tip the contents of the hod into the trailer. The tipping action is the hardest, as once you’re at the top of the ladder that’s leaning against the side of the trailer, there’s really only one way to get them in, and if you’re the one with the hod, you might end up tipping yourself in with them. You brace your hands on the side of the trailer, tip your head right down and hear the thock thock thock, hundreds in a few seconds, as the bunches of grapes pile into the trailer, over your head.

A day’s work might take in a vineyard, a vineyard and a half, or even two, depending how many hands you have, but the trailer could fill up quickly; the truck might have to do a run to the co-operative (where all the vine-growers took their grapes to trade) halfway through the day.

I tried wearing the hod once. I didn’t last very long.

Mick and Marianne grew primarily red grapes, but also a few white grapes; though as I soon learned, these didn’t necessarily correspond to making red and white wine. But I didn’t understand too much about that at the time. What I did learn was that your grapes needed to have a high enough sugar content to be able to make wine, so that after a day’s work in the vineyard, Mick might take it to the co-operative for testing, only to discover that the sugar content was just below 11%, and that the grapes might only be good for second-rate cooking products, or red wine vinegar. If there hadn’t been enough rainfall that season, sugar content might be jeopardised. And well, there hadn’t been quite enough rainfall that season, and I got the impression that most years rainfall wasn’t quite what it should be; but most of the time, the grapes just about came up trumps, over the 11% mark. Mick was mostly relieved.

When you pick grapes by hand, you’re exercising a slow march against the tyranny of the machine. Literally, a slow march, at a grinding and insufferable biological speed up and down row after row of vines, while purpose-designed combine harvesters belonging to less scrupulous vine-growers chug along the rows of another vineyard nearby, mechanical arms stretched over several rows at a time, shaking the vines until all the bunches of grapes fall off and are sucked up into its giant hod. One looks at these and doesn’t wonder if it might all save our backs a bit, but one remembers that one is part of the resistance, exercising a slow march against the tyranny of the machine. By the sweat of our brows, and all that.

For, whether or not you wear the hod, this really is back-breaking work. Bent for hours near ground-level, walking for miles along the rows, carrying heavy buckets back and forth, trying to find the man with the hod, with barely time for a sip of coffee from the shared flask. Mick wasn’t kidding when he winked at me, and said they’d get me working hard. I came back to the house each lunchtime and, after gobbling up whatever was put in front of me, fell onto the sofa and into a sleep that dragged me inexorably downward, until the call was sounded and I dragged myself up again and back to the van for the afternoon’s picking. I slept soundly most nights, too. When you’re picking grapes, you start at 8am, and sometimes finish after 6pm. You work until the work is done.

(I learned to like mushrooms this way, simply because I was famished at every mealtime from the work, and didn’t care that as a child I had rejected them for their slippery sliminess. They just went down with everything else that was put in front of me. I learnt to like courgettes this way too. And I was introduced to some unusual dishes by our Swiss chefs – for example, pasta with sautéed onions, crême fraiche and apple sauce on the side. I continued to cook this for a few years afterwards. I found it benefits from my reliable First General Rule of Vegetarian Cooking, which states that ‘There is no vegetarian meal which is not significantly enhanced by the addition of bacon’.)

It wasn’t slavery. This wasn’t Egypt; Mick wasn’t Pharoah. In France, you don’t work Wednesday afternoons. You do work Saturdays, but those are also only the mornings. And of course you don’t work Sunday either. So, there were some times off.

On the Saturday afternoon, for example, we downed tools at half past twelve, and Mick and Isaac built a barbecue from the rocks around the top of the hilly vineyard we were working in, and gathered old vine wood to set the fire going. You haven’t tried French steak until it has been cooked over smoking vine wood. We lounged and looked at the views and ate blue cheese and steak sandwiches, and saucisson, and of course, drank wine.

Jonathan was with us on this occasion. He was usually in school, which saddened me, because he was the one closest to my age, and I was finding myself desperately needing a friend. So, because he was with us on this occasion, there was a chance for some fun. After eating, he led me around, and we took off down the hill to a stream, where he was determined we would find some wild boar tracks. We searched for a while, and threw rocks into the stream, and talked about school and church and girls, and life in France and life in London. We didn’t find any wild boar tracks. (We did once see a boar through a fence in someone’s garden, though why anyone might keep one as a pet, I can’t for the life of me remember. We did eat a bit of wild boar sausage.)

When you’re picking grapes, and you’re 18, and finally growing up, it seems like most other people know what they’re doing, but you’re at a loss. Most of the time, Jonathan wasn’t with us, and everyone was mostly older than me, except Nadine, who talked incessantly to whoever she was near, which I tried to make sure wasn’t me, too often. But they all seemed to know what they were doing, and got on with it.

And yet it wasn’t that I couldn’t pick grapes. There isn’t much to it. The bunches are all ready and full to bursting, the pruning season a few months earlier having sorted out whittling away the smaller grapes and bunches. So the grapes aren’t hard to find. You start at one end of a row, get a bunch of grapes in your left hand, raise the secateurs to the stalk, and chop them off. In the bucket they go. And repeat, ad infinitum.

It might have been the intensity of it; the heat, as well as the labour. This was mid to late September, but it was the very south of France, and it was still hot. It might have been my unfamiliarity with the terrain, the people, the work. But a creeping and increasing sense of loneliness is what seemed to give rise to the lump in my throat, at times, that I couldn’t force down, or deny with happy thoughts. Loneliness? I was good at being alone yet not lonely. I also wasn’t alone; there were all these people. So why did I feel bereft, cut off, like a withered branch?

Once, fighting back the tears, and barely able to raise my voice, I had to do something, anything, to distract me from the void. So I asked Tony to explain the stock market to me. To this day, I have no idea what he said. He went on, somewhat monotonously, for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, and it was just about enough, to have the sound of a voice talking to me, to keep my emotions from shattering into a thousand pieces under the weight of an unexplained and now seemingly ever-present loneliness.

Not that I attribute this feeling one moment to the lack of attention or care from my hosts or any of their other guests or offspring. Everyone was delightful (even talkative Nadine). But everyone was different from the people I had grown up with. I had been thrown into this with little thought or preparation. I had to find my own two feet, perhaps for the first time in my life. Asking someone to explain the stock market to me was an attempt, however feeble, at finding said feet.

I guess I also prayed, though I don’t know what I might have prayed at the time, being 18, and finding my feet also with my faith again. My prayers, for years, seem never to have advanced very far beyond the ‘God, help me,’ phase – selfish and undefined, but often heard anyway, because of mercy. So I probably uttered some of those under my breath, wiping my brow, breathing heavily as I paused between vines.

I find God often helps us not so much in the moment (like we might want him to), and much more in the long-term (as we in fact need him to). I continued to find the days hard, but what I gained from the experience ended up being so much more transformative for my life, because I stuck with it, and didn’t give up and call home saying I wanted an early flight, though I was sorely tempted to a number of times.

It’s been true since then, too. I’ve asked for a miracle, and God’s infuriatingly given me wisdom instead. I’ve begged for deliverance from runny noses, and God has led me to changes in diet and habits that have drastically reduced my propensity to have a runny nose. I’ve asked for sleep; God’s helped me learn about the science of sleep, and again how to manage myself better so that I sleep better. I’ve asked for reduced stress, and found myself discovering techniques and methods in my work which have drastically reduced that stress. I’ve asked for provision, and God’s given me work and resources to learn how to steward my finances well. In short, I asked for a fish, and he taught me how to fish. At this point, I’d almost say that giving a fish to a man who asks for a fish is just cruelty, for it traps a man in systemic poverty. But I may be getting ahead of myself here. It also comprises the essence of discipleship, not to learn how to work miracles on yourself and others for their own end, but to learn how to walk every day so that the miraculous becomes normal and expected, and what emerges is new creation.

Anyway, I may have prayed a few ‘God, help me,’ prayers. And he did.