Britain at its best

It is my local show at the weekend, a typically British affair as part of a large village fete with lots of other attractions going off. The horticultural show is on grass and under canvas and there really is no other smell to compare, it’s truly wonderful especially if the sun shines. As it will be my last I intend to enjoy the day and I hope those of you who have similar such shows also enjoy some success and that you don’t have to contend with a Harry Ecklethwaite as portrayed in Carrots at Dawn, the brilliant novel written by my good pal Craven Morehead (damn fine fella, brilliant grower, hung like a horse and should be running the country).

TWENTY ONE

Show Day arrives

A British village show held amongst the aroma of newly cut grass under canvas is a truly unique affair to be witnessed nowhere else in the World. It is often the one time of the year when the whole community comes together, where lifelong friendships are forged and love affairs sometimes begin, a time of happiness or perhaps remembrance and reflection. Set against a backdrop of a brass band playing, maybe a World War Two Spitfire roaring overhead or a steam engine hissing, a typical British Summer’s afternoon will see hundreds of people strolling amongst the many attractions with ice creams in their hand or else rushing for cover as a sudden deluge descends. Invariably there are flower and vegetable competitions where the best local growers will exhibit their prized onions, carrots, pumpkins and chrysanthemums. The local ladies also come together to compete against each other with their cakes, and jams, or their knitting and flower arrangements. There are often painting and photography classes to tempt the local artists and pretentious Lord Snowdon’s who will photo-shop their snaps to within an inch of their lives so that they bear absolutely no resemblance to the image they originally captured nor indeed a photograph as most normal people would recognise it. Children will roll up with an assortment of animals made from vegetables, the judge for this class, usually the local vicar or visiting mayor often taking ages over his deliberations before deciding on a one-two-three, sometimes bottling a decision entirely and giving each and every child a ‘highly commended’ and a chocolate bar.

Most of this is intended to be in the name of fun and indeed the majority of the participants enter into it with the same spirit but often rivalries can span decades and encompass varying degrees of bitterness between the protagonists. The nastiest of these rivalries usually revolve around the horticultural classes and it is not uncommon for official complaints to be made after judging by the grower who came second. Sabotage is also something the growers have to watch out for, as Dick Tallboys had discovered many years before. It is not uncommon at shows for exhibits to be tampered with behind the owner’s back. For instance, cucumbers must be shown with the flowers still intact but these very often mysteriously get detached and are never seen again after the grower has left them on the staging bench, thus resulting in him being marked down by the judges. Other tricks include onions having finger nails furtively sunk into them to ruin the skin, or vases of flowers emptied of water so that the flowers have wilted by the time they are judged. A judge also has to be on the look-out for dirty tricks carried out by the growers themselves to enhance their own produce, with pumpkins and marrows often being internally syringed with water to make them weigh more, carrots may have orange furniture polish expertly applied to a crack or a hole and in the longest runner bean class exhibitors will splice two beans together by fixing it to a wooden batten using tape to conveniently hide the join.

Allaways-on-Cock’s annual show was no stranger to such shenanigans. Like most similar shows the growers, bakers, painters and florists had to display their exhibits by a certain time when the marquee will be vacated by everyone except the esteemed judges and their accompanying stewards. This was Harry Ecklethwaite’s stamping ground, his raison d’etre, his beginning and his end. He always got to the marquee a few minutes before it opened for entries at 8am on show day so that he could start reverently placing his sixty or so exhibits in the many classes, thus giving him plenty of time to get the task done before the judges turned up in a few hours. He also liked to give himself plenty of time to weigh up the opposition as and when it appeared, delaying them in conversation if needs be so that they became flustered and made mistakes in their own staging. Four or five growers, sometimes more, from the wider environs of Allaways would come to compete against Harry and Dick when he was alive, but in all of its one hundred plus years the cup for most points had never been won by anyone outside the village. Harry’s reputation spread far and wide and many had tried to usurp him but to no avail, Harry often using underhand methods, some of them described above to ensure such a thing could never happen.

On the occasion of this, the one hundredth show, Harry woke unusually late having stupidly gone from a quick nightcap to four or five large glasses of whisky, his banging head making him more irritable than usual………