FRUIT MACHINE

BY THE time I arrive at West Haugh Farm, it’s a little after 7am, the sun has been up for three hours, the mist has lifted from the fields around Blairgowrie, and another day of the berry harvest is about to begin. It could be a scene from another age, and indeed another country, as hundreds of pickers pull into the farmyard on bicycles, sleep clinging to them like pollen, and greet each other in their native tongues – mostly Polish, but also Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Bulgarian. Swallows, tiny stunt pilots, fly joyously around the red brick chimney of the old jute mill.

“What’s the estimate for today then?” asks Peter Thomson the farmer.

“It’s 3,800 trays,” replies Eddie Christie, who is the farm foreman, or to use the old Scots word he prefers, the grieve. That number of trays translates to around one million strawberries. Imagine that in a single day. The season lasts from the end of May until mid-October, but right now is its peak.

Christie is a whip-thin man of 64 with Billy Fury’s hair, Samuel Beckett’s face and Robbie Shepherd’s voice. He started picking berries at the age of 16 on a farm in Marykirk, finding himself a vocation and a wife, Ann, into the bargain. He prides himself on being able to estimate, by close examination of the crop, how many trays of strawberries and raspberries will be picked each day. It’s important work. Underestimate and the fruit may go unsold. Overestimate and Tesco, Sainsbury’s and the like will not receive the amount of fruit they were expecting, news they would not take well.

“It’s an absolutely brutal business,” says Peter Thomson, who is 56. “The supermarkets have got zero tolerance.” They take a 40 per cent cut and will impose hefty fines for fruit which they reject as not meeting their standards. Growers, therefore, have a horror of mould and root rot, and insist that the pickers handle the fruit with infinite gentleness. “There are two ways to pick a raspberry,” Christie explains, demonstrating, like some Doric tai chi master, the finger-curl and the three-finger-pick. “The criminal thing is squeezing it. If you break the drupelets, you’re crying out for a juicing in the punnet.”

Thomas Thomson, which is the name of Peter Thomson’s firm, harvests around 50 million strawberries and a similar number of raspberries each year. The industry as a whole is worth £130 million to the Scottish economy. It is a big business. High pressure and high stakes. And yet in truth it is difficult to get a real sense of that as you walk around the farm. The view across the Strathmore valley to the Sidlaw hills is gorgeous. The air smells of honest sweat and is filled with the electronic burble of unseen skylarks. The berries taste sweeter and juicier than their shop-bought kin. The fruit has the heat of the day in it, and something of the languid, erotic, narcotic quality of Edwin Morgan’s poem Strawberries.

Within this bucolic setting, the polytunnels appear futuristic, alien. They protect the fruit from the cold and the rain, extending the growing season and improving the quality. It’s quite trippy inside them – stifling, hushed; the only sounds are the drowsy drone of bees and music leaking from the iPods of the pickers.

Przemek Uzieblo, a 27-year-old in baseball cap and knee-pads, has downloaded a show from a Polish techno station and is listening to it through his phone. Others favour Macedonian metal, Bulgarian folk or the power ballads of Whitney Houston. Rusu Florin-Dragos, a 24-year-old Romanian student in a blue Nike T-shirt, has recorded his construction lectures and listens to those as he works.

The farm employs 400 pickers, putting them up in caravans and cottages on site. Most are students, but you get entire families travelling “to the berries”. There are picking dynasties. The Mazurs, the Bulas, the Zelkas, the Blazinskas. Mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and sons.

Inevitably, with so many young people living and working together so closely for so long, romances blossom. Last year, Jamie, one of the supervisors, learned Slovak specifically so that he could woo a beautiful young picker called Iveta. “Working here,” says Fiona Caldow, the senior supervisor, “you definitely don’t need to watch soap operas.”

The pickers are suntanned and strong. Neither peely nor wally, they could never be mistaken for Scots. Some of the women have that solid, muscular, unstoppable look familiar from field athletes of the Soviet era.

There is a misconception that the industry employs so many eastern Europeans rather than locals because they will work for low wages. In fact, they earn at least the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board minimum of £5.96 per hour. There is the opportunity to make more than this, however, as workers get paid according to the weight of berries they pick. Anyone picking so few berries that they would, if paid by the kilo, earn less than minimum wage is likely to be sacked before too long as they are, in effect, costing the farmer money. The real reason so few Scots work as pickers, according to growers, is that they cannot or will not work fast enough to justify their employment. They find the work too hard or quit on the grounds that they would be better off on benefits. Scots, sad to say, are too soft to pick soft fruit.

It was not always thus. Raspberries have been grown commercially in Scotland since the late 19th century, beginning right here in the Blairgowrie area. Indeed, Peter Thomson’s family have been in the berry business since 1905. And for most of that time, the picking was done by Scots, especially Dundonians. It was part of the texture of the Dundee summer. Each morning, the so-called “berry buses” would visit housing schemes, such as Fintry and Kirkton, and transport hundreds of local kids and adults to the berry fields of Blairgowrie, Alyth and Kirriemuir. Child labour laws mean that youngsters are no longer allowed to pick berries, but as recently as the 1970s, boys and girls were expected to do so in order to pay for their new school uniforms. Gary Robertson’s excellent play The Berries captures the flavour of the era.

It was harder graft back then as well. New varieties of raspberry have been bred without thorns, but it used to be that your arms would get shredded at the rasps. And there were no polytunnels to keep you from getting burnt or soaked. Mind you, the rain was rather welcome as it would increase the weight of your raspberries and you’d get paid more. “Another thing folk used to do for that was to piss in the pails,” says Christie,

Back then, with parents and children working together, it was a chance for poor families to earn much-needed extra income. The money is just as meaningful now for pickers from countries where wages are low. Sirbu Florin, a 30-year-old from the Romanian city Iasi, lies back in the sun during the half-hour lunch break, muscles flexing beneath his minotaur and magic mushroom tattoos, and explains why he is here. “My country offers me nothing. I want to live better. In one month in Romania I could make £150.” He is in sales and marketing. “Here, if you are a good picker, you can make £70-£80 a day. But you must concentrate. Just you, the strawberry, and nothing else.” After the berries, he is going tattie-howking.

The undisputed King of the Pickers is a 28-year-old Pole called Woijeich (pronounced Voy-check) Mucha. The supervisors speak of him with a mixture of amusement and awe. “Woijeich is a machine,” says Caldow of the man known as The Combine or The Fly. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s strawberries or raspberries,” says Christie, “he’s the fastest at both. He just loves picking fruit.”

I catch up with Woijeich among the raspberries. He is wearing a brown hoody and orange baseball cap. Attached to his thick leather belt is a slim blue rope tied at the other end to a metal sledge; he drags his trays of fruit behind him as he passes along the dreels. Christie said that good pickers have fast hands and fast eyes; Woijeich clearly has both these qualities and then some. He can fill a punnet with rasps in less than a minute. His hands are a blur as they plunge into the bushes. Watching him pick berries is like watching Ali fight, like watching Neo in The Matrix; he seems to exist in a different temporal plane. He once picked 90 trays of strawberries in one day. His record with raspberries is 70. Most pickers are doing really well if they reach 50. “Sometimes I am faster,” he says, glaring at the bush as if it were his mortal foe. “Today berries too much green.”

By the time I leave West Haugh Farm, it is late afternoon, the hour of sore backs and dry throats and cravings for cold beer. The berries picked today will soon be on sale throughout Britain. It is one of the sadnesses of supermarket logistics that a housewife in sultry Slough, selecting a piece of fruit from the fridge and biting into its cool tart flesh, will never know that it ripened to the sound of skylarks and Polish techno, and that a genius called Woijeich plucked it from the plant.

I’m glad I know. It’s been a beautiful day. I’d like to remember these people, their stories and these strawberry fields forever.