School life / One harvest festival in Salisbury, a week in late September
Bring One Thing for Harvest. We Brought Fourteen.
The note from school asked each family for a single item. I read it the way I read a speed limit.
The harvest note from the youngest’s school asked for one item per family. I read it the way I read a speed limit: one was clearly the starting point. Other households have managed this. Michael Winterman, remembering harvest at St Mark’s on Wyndham Road in Salisbury, states the rules without fuss: “you could only bring one thing.” His teacher, Miss Rowden, wrote a little note for the children to take home. His mother suggested a carrot or a cabbage. He thinks he took an apple. One note, one mother, one possible apple. It has the calm of a family that has never owned a label maker.
Ours went differently. By Sunday night the kitchen table held a tin of peaches, two tins of chickpeas, a butternut squash, a bag of basmati, a jar of Marmite and a box of Weetabix. My husband asked how many things that was. I said it was one contribution, in several parts.
Then I made the mistake of research. Katie Hillier, looking back in British Vogue, remembered the teachers at her school turning the harvest food into a display in the hall, and one year there was a robot made of baked beans. Nobody had told me robots were an option. On Monday I bought eleven tins of Heinz from the Co-op and built a torso on the hall floor. My husband, who once built a shed from a kit and had four screws left over, said it looked like a tin pile that had been promoted.
Then Simon Carter finished me off. At Manor Field County Primary in Burgess Hill, he remembers, the food pile in the school hall included tins of corned beef with their little keys missing, and he wondered how anyone was supposed to get in. “Someone explained ‘tin openers’ to me at this point, and it completely blew my mind.” I read this aloud at breakfast as a warning about thoroughness. The youngest, who is six, put down his spoon and went very quietly to the kitchen drawer.
On Wednesday we arrived with three Bags for Life and a robot in a laundry basket. One of the Year 2 teachers looked at the bags, then at the note pinned to the classroom door, then at me, and held up a single finger. She was very nice about it. We were allowed to choose. The youngest chose the peaches, because sellotaped to the lid, three layers deep, handle outwards, was our tin opener.
Thirteen items came home. That evening I went to make beans on toast and stood at the open drawer for some time. We now own eleven tins of Heinz, a robot in the hallway and no means of entering any of them. It completely blew my mind.
Sources
- Milford Street Bridge Project, St Mark’s School – education and much more besides
- Simon Carter, My Mum Loved Tinned Peaches. Childhood, Harvest and The Man From Del Monte
- Katie Hillier, Harvest For The World, British Vogue
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column