Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Maes-y-Dydd ·
The Quiet in the Hop Garden at Maes-y-Dydd
A hop picker who returned to the Maes-y-Dydd garden after thirty years describes the bines standing still in a windless evening, every leaf turned toward the same figure at the far hedge, and a row of pickers' baskets already filled.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: Joan Hughes, former hop picker
I picked hops at Maes-y-Dydd every September from the age of nine until I married and went to the town, and I know the gardens better than most people who still live in the valley. The bines grow up the poles in long green ropes, twelve feet high, and the hops hang in heavy cones from the top. You pick them into a basket at your feet, all day, until your back aches and your fingers are stained brown and your nose is full of the smell, bitter and sweet at once, like beer in a warm cellar.
I went back last September, thirty years on, because my sister's husband was ill and the family wanted someone to sit with the old farm dog. The garden is still there. Most of the poles have gone, and the hedge has grown wild, but the rows are still laid out in the same long lines under the sky.
On the first evening I walked down to the bottom field at dusk and found the bines had stopped moving.
I should explain that the wind in the Maes-y-Dydd valley never really stops. It comes down off the hill in the afternoon and sways the hop bines all night, and you go to sleep to the sound of the leaves knocking on the wire. That evening there was no wind at all. The air was still and heavy, and the bines hung perfectly motionless from their poles, every leaf turned in the same direction.
They were turned toward the far hedge.
There was someone standing there. A woman in a long brown pinafore, the old sort of dress we used to wear for picking, with a basket on one arm and a scarf over her hair. She was not doing anything. She was only standing at the end of the row, looking up at the bines, the way you would look at a field you were thinking of buying. Her face was in shadow. The light from the sunset came over the hedge and touched the edge of her scarf and her hands, and I could see the hands were stained brown to the wrist.
I called out. I said hello, and asked whether she had come for the picking. She did not turn round. But the bines around her began to shiver, very softly, all the way down the row, and the sound that came up from them was the sound of picking. A rustling, a snapping of stems, a soft patter of hops falling into baskets. It came from every row in the field at once, and I could see, in the dusk, that the baskets along the hedge were already full, heaped high and pale green, though there was nobody near them.
I went back to the farmhouse. I did not tell my sister. But the next morning, when I walked down to the bottom field, the baskets were still there, full and neat in a line along the hedge, and each one had a small handwritten label tied to its handle, in an old copperplate hand, with a name on it.
I knew some of the names. They were the names of girls who had picked at Maes-y-Dydd with me in the sixties, friends from the village who had married and moved away and died. One label said *Peg Rowlands, 1961*. Another said *Winnie Ash, 1958, a good picker*. The last one, at the end of the row, was blank. There was nothing written on it at all, only a single hop cone tied to the handle with a piece of green thread.
I have been back to the garden every evening since. The bines are always still at dusk. The woman in the brown pinafore is always at the far hedge, looking up at the hops, and every evening the baskets are a little fuller. The blank label has not been filled. But this morning I walked down with my own basket, the old wicker one from my childhood, and found it already hanging at the end of the row, full to the brim, with a new label tied to it, in my own hand, dated for next September.