I once lived in a small town in the West Country

Many of the local families

Had been there for generations

Or at least from last week

It was crappy/ happy town

Surrounded by sleeping fields

I attended a church skool

Which although deeply academic

Was populated by savages (including myself)

The grotto of the skool was Look After Others

And this is how the Harvest Festival started

Especially after Miss Perkins came to teach Latin and Guerrilla Warfare to the Third Year and the Retards who were kept in a shed

This naive girl was as the daughter of a defrocked vicar

And thought that to aid others

Might help her father gain forgiveness

So she arranged a Harvest Hope Festival and a pub crawl

In the weeks leading up to the harvest celebrations

The boys and girls of St Jude’s were encouraged to bring in harvest gifts

For the elderly dead and less fortunate of the town

This would either be produce from the fields or stuff nicked from the local supermarkets

Shops in our town were encouraged to donate useful items such as jack hammers and broken gnomes for broken gardens

Our fathers (if we had one) were asked to donate goods typical of their profession

Sally Stephens dad owned a motorbike shop and Timmy Tam’s a rifle range on the Bath Rose Road

My dad owned a newsagents shop so I blindly donated used train mags which I had finished with and out of date mars bars turned white

Sue Smith’s father a fruit farmer with a lisp culled peoples pets free of charge and sold them in his father’s ironmongers shop

There were many kind people living on our little town

Miss Perkins insisted that the harvest gifts be presented in light baskets decorated with a ribbon and a note of greeting

We were such a loving community with the Beer Sisters being the most loving of us all

And that is where it all went wrong as after the Harvest Festival all pupils with bicycles were asked to deliver the harvest baskets to all those who deserved them

Little old ladies with dead poodles and war heroes without legs all were welcome

Even my granny who had been dead since 1901 received a basket

It should have worked but it did not as many boys and girls just blagged the whole thing

Some accepted money from the grateful old folk and asked for more

Some baskets were raided en-route with the contents stolen or sold to the said pensioners at the next Saturday market

Bikes and baskets were stolen and never seen again

Some of the baskets were sold to the senile old farts in care homes

Harvest baskets without anything decent left in them would be found rotting in lonely fields for weeks afterwards

It was the duty (as part of the honour) to make sure that none of the old people were dead

We were expected to knock only four times and if the door was not opened then inform the local pigs

This was another failure as many harvest baskets were just lobbed over hedges or into gardens as many pensioners were stone deaf

Selling the harvest gifts to one’s parents was strictly prohibited

Bubble gum gobstoppers and hundreds and thousands were not considered to be appropriate gifts although freshly killed rabbits were considered game

The use of pensioners outside bogs was also prohibited and could only be used in extreme circumstances like a dodgy curry

If used all scrape marks should be removed and the toilet flushed with brown acid

The door of all outside bogs should remain closed for the duration of the crap as not to scare any nervous budgies in the area

These were a sample of the many harvest do’s and don’ts

I am sad to tell you that Miss Perkins ended up in house for crazy people as she thought that everybody came from tins of baked beans

It is said that ones schooldays are the best days of your life long before the prison sentences scabies and learning how to cook

I tend to agree with this as I still have the crab apples which were so lovingly stolen from the skool garden in 1943



Silly Boy Remembers His Pet Hummingbird (2025)

Also available in Green and Pink