It is the month of ripeness – a golden, crimson and russet month. Here in Kent the orchards offer themselves to stage the drama of the year. Throughout the summer, when the fields around were alive with the sounds of haymaking and harvest, these miles of trees grew in silence, while the pale green of the swelling apples hid beneath the leaves. Since their pink and white foaming in May, no one has remarked them, except perhaps the mower as he cut the grass from around their feet, or the farmer as he has watched the apples setting. But now all that is changed. These calm golden days have brought ladders and shouting, the creaking of wheels and the thud of falling apples.

The gatherers come early, when the dew on the heavy grass and nettles wets their legs and bediamonds the leaves, and there is a mysterious gloom and depth of shadow along the aisles of trees.

A glow burns through the countryside at the thought of the apple gathering. ‘They have started picking,’ say the old people to each other down in the village. Something stirs in their blood, a memory of gatherings when the mistletoe was sacred, and prayer gave motion to the sun, and stones were still alive. So, too, do their hands and minds leap mountains and centuries, linking in pagan continuity with gods, grape-stained in their Mediterranean vineyards. It is one of the pinnacles in the rhythm of their year.

The army of ladders attacks the trees. On all sides, at all angles, are they reared, placed against unresisting branches and in the clefts of gnarled trunks – a veritable fugue in ladders. The old men with their baskets on a hook start picking the lower apples within reach of the safety of the ground; rheumaticky limbs are not so fond of climbing. But the youth leap the ladders, and systematically the pillage begins. The trees shake and tremble, the figures run up and down, emptying picking aprons, exchanging full for empty baskets; and the branches leap upwards, relieved of their weight of fruit.

And now the sun is high and each tree courteously spreads a circular dark green carpet of shade beneath itself. They stretch, these circles of shadows, back into the shapelessness of distance, narrowing into ellipses as they go.

At midday, as the sun beats down upon the browned arms of the pickers, the men step with relief into the shade. It is dinner time. Bottles of cold tea and beer are produced, and chunks of cheese and bread; and leaning against the trunks of the trees they sit, or sprawling in the shadow, they eat and talk. Old Tom Latimer has picked ‘this seventy year’. He mumbles with his toothless jaw, comparing this tree with that, this year’s yield with the one of thirty years back. He is himself like one of his own apples; red lacquer stains each cheek, wizened as an apple forgotten in the loft. As a shepherd knows each sheep in his flock, so is the intimate shape of each apple tree stamped upon Tom’s mind. He shakes his head at the young men lazing, and is off up the ladders again.

So throughout the hot afternoon they pick, moving their ladders and baskets over the board of the orchard like counters in a game. And as the pickers move, they are followed by the clumps of men who sort the apples. Instinctively, mechanically, they select them, by weight and soundness, dealing them out into the right bushel baskets. Following the group of baskets, in their turn come the carts. There is a swishing sound as they brush the trees in passing. The horse tosses his head into the lower leaves of the tree, against the attacking flies. And so the fruit of the trees is taken away, to be covered up and labelled and put into a railway siding, for grey-faced people in the cities who never saw an apple shine upon the top-most bough against the blue of the September sky.

But what is that shouting away over the fields? What is that music of mouth organ and concertina? Beyond the trees and past the next slope ends another harvesting and the ravaged Kentish hop fields are lying back to rest. While still the apple trees bent beneath their fruit, these hop fields were half stripped. Poles were torn up, wreathed with the tendrilled hop plants, and laid against the canvas tally baskets, till they looked like the oars of an ancient galley. Here, for the picking, gather the outpourings of the London slums, in all their flimsy finery and their fear of rain, cumbered with babies and tin tea kettles. The fields must have shivered with the clamour. Girl shouted to girl across the avenues of hop poles; old woman quarrelled with old woman, till the feathers in their bonnets nodded drunkenly; sun-cheated children chased each other among the tally baskets; tired, white-faced men sighed from out their contentment as they counted the diminishing days before they should be sent back to the heaving heat of the London pavements. And over it all was the beauty of the hop plants, like a blessing.

But with cheers and shouting, concertinas and song, the last lorry load of pickers has left the hop fields, and the naked hop poles stand silent.

Over the country there is peace. The resting fields have given up their yield. Oast houses and rickyards and barns are full. In the cottage gardens the fruit has been picked, apple and pear, quince and plum. Go down the village street on a late September afternoon and the warm burnt smell of jam-making oozes out of open cottage doors. Soon the last apple will have been picked and the orchards will be silent again.

Sunday evening in the village church: the days are drawing in and the smelly gas lamps flicker unevenly with the greenish yellow light. It is Harvest Festival and the church is full. Farmer Stevens peeps behind him to look with a sense of possession at his sheaves of wheat around the font. Old Mrs Yeo is wondering where her orange dahlias have been put, and knows that the pink ones in the place of honour on the pulpit are not as good as hers. Rows of large apples line the chancel, red and yellow and green. The lectern is almost hidden in a tangle of oats. Obscurely at the back sits a ploughboy. He is shy and fidgets with his bow under the unaccustomed constriction of his Sunday collar. He has lost his way in the Service, for he never comes to church. But every year the Harvest Festival pulls him. He listens to the vicar preaching; he sees the squire and his lady in the front pew, and all the gentry smiling to each other. He feels lonely and untidy. Suddenly a flame of understanding consumes him. He is surrounded by white light and God’s hand is upon him. This is his service. It is about him that the vicar is preaching. He no longer fears the squire and his lady and all the gentry in the church. Those oats are his, and the wheat round the font. Who but he knew the fields before the plough had turned them? Was it not he who rose in the dark of winter mornings and with chilblained hands and numb feet fed the horses? Who else but he had withstood the March gales as he followed the plough? And now it is Harvest Festival. He strains forward to look at the apples, the oats and the wheat.

‘Yes,’ he tells himself. ‘It is mine! All mine.’

To the ploughboy the meaning of gathering is revealed.

Clare Leighton, The Farmer’s Year:
A Calendar of English Husbandry, 1933