Picking up sticks

I didn’t quite catch all of the congratulatory speech at the end of today’s session, but I’m fairly sure the word “stonking” came into it somewhere.

“You started the job off; and now you’ve finished it,” were certainly among the encouraging words with which the site warden sent us off this morning.  “All this …

was once scrubland, and will be grassland.”  This, the ‘scrub-bash’ zone, will be grazed by sheep this spring, and again in the autumn.

Our particular task today: to clear up after another volunteer work-party had completed the actual felling.  There were also one or two “twigs” to be picked up and taken to the firewood pile.  Some had to be reduced, just a little, before they could be moved:

The look on volunteers’ faces when the “twig” had been reduced to manageable proportions tells how hard that was:

No pretty pictures this week of ashes being raked to ‘wake up’ the fire for disposing of the brash, or even of wood stacked for burning.  I couldn’t bring myself to photograph them, given that today was also Holocaust Memorial Day (70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz II Birkenau).  My own thoughts had just kept returning to the vignette of the brenner (Naum Rozenberg) in Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece, Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба Pt One, Ch 44): a fictional treatment of events which were only too real.

Other people’s thoughts may have operated along similar lines, for when some of us undertook the log-carrying challenge …

I heard several volunteers comment along the lines of “Just imagine doing that in a labour camp – on gruel.”  Like most of the workforce, even fuelled by Green-Gym refreshments, I could manage only 3 ‘reps’, and that was with just one – OK, slightly bigger – log.  We thought too of the camps run by the Gulag in Siberia, and of the ‘reform through labour’ camps, under other regimes, which are still operating to this day.

As we Green-Gymmers are genuine volunteers, we could each of us stop work when we had reached the limits of what we personally could do; and the session came to a highly civilised end in good time for lunch. 

We look forward, on return visits to the site, to seeing sheep in place on their new pasture.