Slava Ukraini

IT was just after 1pm on Sunday, September 18, when I stopped pruning and looked around me.

The scene was nothing unusual. Six rows of strawberry plants being steadily trimmed by a cohort of pickers with the gentle, almost rhythmic sound of snipping turning the polytunnel into a bucolic barbershop.

The picker in the second row noticed I had stopped and was looking at him and his colleagues from Kyrgyzstan.

“What is it?” said Emilbek, perhaps wondering if I was unhappy with his pruning. I replied to him in English before whipping out my iPhone and opening a translation app to clear up his confusion.

“When the season began in March we started with five Ukrainians and one Moldovan,” I said wistfully to my friend from Bishkek.

“Now there are eight Kyrgyz here and just one Ukrainian left. I was just thinking about how things have changed.”

God knows how I got here, but I write this now as a team leader (we don’t use the word supervisor on the farm, although it’s the same job in all but name). Since March I have overseen a team of pickers from all corners of the former USSR, from Moldova in the south west to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in the east. We had just over 20 at the height of picking with the majority hailing from Kyrgyzstan, a poor but beautiful central Asian country that borders China.

They were an unknown quantity but they learned quickly, picked well and have done their country proud. But with no offence to them the pickers closest to my heart have come from Ukraine.

We were always due to have a Ukrainian contingent on our workforce as visas were sorted out long before Putin sent his tanks across the border. Some couples were among them but when the invasion started the men were all conscripted, so the wives made a fraught journey to the UK while the men fought or farmed at home, depending on their location.

The first picker to arrive was Halyna. She lives in the far west of Ukraine, fairly close to the Polish border so getting into the EU wasn’t that tricky. Still, it can’t have been easy leaving her husband behind as Misha was signed up to Ukraine’s version of the home guard. Don’t panic, as this story ends well and you’ll hear more about him later.

I knew very little Ukrainian in March but I could say “Hello” as I learned it before meeting some children from the Chernobyl fallout zone in the mid 2010s. So on a cold morning I walked out of the barn, down the track to the polytunnels and said “Preeveet” to a waiting Halyna. She smiled and said it back. Good start.

The first job wasn’t so easy as the pair of us spent the day on our knees weeding and removing new growth from the bottom of raspberry plants. I’ve been here before and had my knee pads to ease the pain a bit, but poor Halyna must have wondered what she was getting into.

The numbers swelled two days later when Viktoria R and Natalia joined the ranks. The latter was like the mother of the group while Viktoria’s journey was especially hard as there was a day’s travelling to leave Ukraine and a bit of rough sleeping enroute. Her husband was left to run their sunflower farm a fairly short drive away from Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and, somewhat worryingly, the troubled occupied nuclear plant in the middle south of the country.

Despite their backgrounds and difficult recent history, it became instantly clear that I had three terrific workers on my hands. Viktoria and Natalia threw themselves into the job from the off and the four of us made headway with our pruning and weeding task.

Then came a sharp and very sobering reminder and a realisation these workers were very different to the Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians and those who had picked before them.

It came in musical form as I decided to play some Ukrainian radio to give them a taste of home. It was mainly poppy and mostly European before the opening lines of a rousing Ukrainian folk song hammered home who I was dealing with.

“Oy u luzi chernova kalyna…”

The song’s title in English is “In the meadow, a red kalyna”, and if you’ve gone anywhere near Facebook, YouTube, or like a little bit of Pink Floyd, since February the chances are you’ve heard it. It’s a 20th century call to arms which features the lyric “do not worry, glorious Ukraine, you have a free people” with later verses heralding the masses “marching forward” and “engaging the enemy”.

In the meadow, a red kalyna. You must watch this if you haven't already.

When it came on the radio all three of my Ukrainians started singing it together. They didn’t stop working, but I did. It suddenly hit me that these women were not just workers, but refugees of sorts, and were singing a patriotic ditty in their native tongue. Singing it while their homeland was, and still is, engaging the enemy.

Sure, I’ve written stories about people returning from war zones and helping refugees, but I’ve never worked with any, let alone been in charge of some. I was stunned into silence. It was an incredibly sobering and haunting moment and I fear I’m not doing it justice here. But it also made me realise is that I would do whatever I could to make them as welcome as possible on the farm, and in our country in general.

Alina and Viktoria I swelled the ranks to five a few weeks later - they were already in the UK having previously worked at a mushroom farm in Northern Ireland – with Moldovan picker Viorica arriving in early April to complete the picture.

Another person to make the move around this time was little old me. With previous supervisor Christian out of the picture since October, the decision was made to promote me from packhouse operative to team leader.

The move surprised me a little but I’ve enjoyed the challenge. I suppose I ticked all the boxes. I had two years of QC experience from the packhouse, had done my fair share of picking and had carried out most husbandry tasks from pruning to planting, so perhaps I was worth a punt. I'll write more about my team leading experience in the next entry.

The first test was getting the girls to pick strawberries correctly as there’s more to it than pulling them off a stem. They have to be the right colour, shape and size for starters, plus you’ve also got to remove any duds and leave the plant as clean as possible before moving on.

Then there’s picking to weight and making sure any bad habits are eradicated early on. I remember a lot of checking, giving a lot of encouragement and advice and constantly popping up in the rows with my scales. I also used Google translate to write handwritten orders in Ukrainian, but all the hard work paid off. The average picking speed rose daily and within a couple of weeks it was well past our target of 18kg/h, often reaching the mid-20s.

The fastest was Viktoria R with Halyna fairly close behind. The former remained the fastest all season and belied her fairly diminutive frame with her speed and stamina. Even Steve was impressed, saying she could pick faster than him despite his decades’ worth of experience.

The remaining four soon all passed the 20kg/h mark and within a few weeks of our first pick we were filling close to 500 trays on a daily basis. The days were long and early season Graham, Steve, Mike, Ryan and I often had to help, but the commitment was the best I’ve come across on the farm. I was proud to lead them, and the unity we shared hadn’t gone unnoticed.

“Those girls would walk over hot coals for you right now, Paul,” said Graham to me early into the season. “They’re just unbelievable, aren’t they?”. The consensus was they liked me as a person and leader, and it was showing in their effort.

I look back at this time as the happiest I have been on the farm. Maybe we’ve been gentler to them because of their circumstances, but I genuinely think they’ve thrived because of the encouragement and the almost 1-to-1 support we’ve given them, which you will not get on bigger farms. I like to compare Westlands to a village school because our “class” of pickers is probably one of the smallest around, so there’s more scope for individual guidance.

And while it’s true that familiarity can breed complacency, I like to think a happy worker is a good worker so I have given them little surprises as an incentive. I found some Ukrainian chocolate bars from an ethnic shop in Portsmouth to hand out early on, while our first trip together was to a big Polish shop in Southampton.

The best surprise came on the Friday before their Easter Sunday, which they celebrate a week later than us. After doing some research into Ukrainian Easter festivities I noticed they like to eat a sweetish cake called Paska so I began a mission to find one

I started by messaging a bakery in Bishop’s Waltham but, disappointingly, they didn't reply so I began searching around Portsmouth’s ever-increasing number of Polish and Eastern European shops. I nearly bought a Paska in a Romanian shop in North End, but I learned it wasn’t the real deal after chatting to a couple and explaining I was buying for some Ukrainians.

After getting home I started looking around my neighbourhood but again, I found nothing. I had almost given up when I looked on Facebook and discovered a Lithuanian shop in North End had one left with 30 minutes before closure. The Romanian shop I had visited an hour beforehand was 100 yards away from it. Grrrr.

So I ran the half-mile to the nearest bus stop, nipped on the 3 back to North End and then ran a few hundred yards more to the Lithuanian shop on Chichester Road. Stumbling through the door and slightly gasping to the cashier, I noticed the solitary brioche-like cake on the counter.

“Paska?” I said, slightly exasperated before she nodded slightly and went “da.”

Cake bought for a fraction of the Romanian fake paska, I walked home feeling dead chuffed. The running and the research was worth it just to see the pickers’ faces when I handed over the paska at the end of picking on Friday. I will never forget their smiles and I like to think the bond was well and truly cemented then.

This is Paska. Paska is a popular Easter cake in Slavic regions. It is delicious, but hard to get hold of in Portsmouth.

It’s also probably helped that I’ve been learning Ukrainian through Duolingo and I’m currently on a streak of 175 days without missing a lesson. I’m still not quite able to hold a long conversation, but I can do basic phrases, directions and say the odd relevant thing like “next greenhouse please” or most importantly, “lunch”. I get by and I can probably call Ukrainian my third language now after French or German.

An outing to Winchester followed before we welcomed the first non-Ukrainian/Moldovans to the farm. Bolotbek, Aida, Aibek and Asel were our first arrivals from Kyrgyzstan and were followed in the coming weeks by seven more countrymen and women in the shape of Avazbek, Kurmanbek, Asel (another one), Emilbek, Kyiazbek, Kanybek and Erlan. Two Kazakh cousins, Timur and Akbar, joined the mix along with another Moldovan called Alexandr.

MY GOD MY HAIR WAS LONG! A day out to Winchester with the Ukrainians (and one Moldovan). L-R: Viktoria R, Viorica, Natalia, Alina, Viktoria I, Halyna, Me, my wife Nicky; Kneeling L-R: Kayleigh, Thomas, Charlotte and Graham.

I was a bit apprehensive about leading a team of 20+ pickers given I speak minimal Russian, let alone Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Romanian, Moldovan or any language whose alphabet features back-to-front characters or letters that resemble space invaders. I needn’t have worried though and while some of the newbies needed some extra encouragement and guidance, most ended up dependable and useful pickers. I say most, as some a couple had issues with time management and aggressiveness with the fruit and this didn’t go unnoticed.

Our Ukrainian contingent grew in May when Halyna persuaded her 50-something friend Lydia to join the coup. She stayed a few months and was useful picker, albeit a bit generous. I’d rather have too many berries than too few in a punnet though, as you can use the excess to top up the underweight ones.

The next Ukrainian arrival was Valentyna and she probably had the toughest background and journey of them all, coming from the heavily bombed city of Kharkiv. She and her Bulgarian husband fled as refugees and were being housed in Southampton by one of our shoppers.

She spoke of daily air raids, craters in the streets caused by errant Russian missiles and apartments with blown out windows. With trains and roads both vulnerable to strikes getting from Kharkiv to the safety of Poland was a desperate and hellish journey. I gave her a lift home one day and she had a long and slightly angry rant about Putin, asking how just one man could do this, forcing millions from their homes in terror just because of a misled belief that Ukraine is Russian.

We were never going to turn away a Ukrainian but it soon became clear she wasn’t here to make up the numbers as she spoke excellent English and took to picking quickly. She instantly made friendships and we often called on her to translate, although she didn’t like helping out when we had to put our foot down with some pickers. Understandable, I suppose.

I can still hear her now saying “Pauuuul… what time do we finish today” which she asked every day, without fail.

She also taught me some very useful Ukrainian swear words, helped me with my learning and took pleasure in organising birthday treats for the pickers. One of which was mine, as she called me away from filling punnets at the greenhouses on a May Sunday morning to a group rendition of happy birthday. They also gave me cake and whisky (GET IN!) while Ryan filmed it all for a social media post that never was. I was touched while the narcissist in me wondered if the previous supervisors got the same birthday treatment in the past. They did not.

The trip I organised to Portsmouth for my team was one of the best things I've ever done at Westlands. In order of appearance: Timur, Akbar, Viktoria I, Alina, Halyna, Lydia, Viorica, Natalia, Viktoria R, Aibek, Bolotbek (sitting) and Aida (sitting).

Natalia left in June shortly after getting her visa extended and we were worried that a Ukrainian exodus would follow given the tightness of the group. But our fears were unwarranted and if anything the pickers opened up and became closer.

Lydia left around July but was replaced by Halyna’s football-loving husband, Misha, as he was given leave from the Ukrainian army. The last to arrive at Westlands was Valentyna’s friend, Anna, a single mother from Kharkiv who lived in a bomb-damaged apartment with no windows. I was told she and her five-year-old son spent nearly two days travelling non-stop from Eastern Ukraine to Southampton on public transport and slept for most of the journey from Luton airport to Hampshire.

But around the time of her arrival in August, the Ukrainian diaspora at the farm began to decrease as Viktoria I left to hook up with her boyfriend in Blackburn. Although she wasn’t the fastest, Viktoria was a sweet girl who picked good quality fruit to weight and I would certainly have her back.

Viorica left mid-season for health reasons and has sadly been unable to return which is a shame as the Moldovan was the joker of the group. She always had her colleagues laughing and was also a pretty good picker, often featuring at the top end of the league.

The chapter all but closed on our Ukrainian affair over the weekend of September 10 when I organised a farm trip to London. Everyone bar Alexandr and Valentyna joined us for a memorable sight-seeing jaunt around the capital, with even Graham – who hates London – and Ryan joining us for a journey the day after the Queen’s death.

When I returned to the farm after a four-day break, I learned that Valentyna had returned to Ukraine for reasons I won’t go into here and Anna hadn’t returned as she was dependant on her friend for travel from Southampton to the farm. Viktoria R, Halyna and Misha had informed Graham they were departing on the 17th, leaving us with just Alina as our sole Ukrainian representative.

The London trip was a good leaving present for many of the pickers as it was also the last I saw of Timur and Akbar, who I will write more about in a future entry. I take my proximity to London for granted as I can be our capital in 90 minutes, but for the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and some Ukrainians it was a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime chance to visit one of the world’s great cities.

The trip took place after the day after the Queen’s death so we spent (or wasted, dare I say it) a couple of hours standing on The Mall for a glimpse of the King. But we still got to see Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Trafalgar Square, the Houses of Parliament and the South Bank. We also had street food by the Thames, caught a ferry to the Tower and saw Tower Bridge open up twice during our stay. It was an intensive nine hours, but it was worth it and I’d love to organise another jaunt next year.

But it was back to reality on Thursday and within 120 hours of me returning to work, three pickers were leaving their caravans for the last time as Halyna, Misha and Viktoria R picked their last strawberries on Sunday, September 18.

Halyna’s last task brought things full circle as she was asked to remove drippers from the raspberry pots before her 11.30am finish. She began her Westlands career on her knees in the raspberry polytunnels, and that’s how she would finish.

After I called lunch (or OBEEEED in Ukrainian/Russian) she and Misha invited me into their caravan for lunch and I was treated to a Ukrainian feast with stew, bread, salami, cheese, lemon tea and a cheeky lustre of Kyiv beer. I was honoured. We shared memories of our first few weeks on the farm together before I recalled how I cleaned her caravan before she arrived and how much I had enjoyed working with her and her colleagues. Before leaving at 4pm I knocked on Viktoria’s door to say goodbye and she responded by thanking Graham and I for our kindness, adding that she had enjoyed her Westlands tenure.

Before the first Kyrgyz arrived in April, I kept saying to Graham, Steve and the core team that I wanted a team of Ukrainian women to lead if the first five were anything to go by. Alina, Halyna and the two Viktorias were among the best pickers I’ve had a pleasure to work with. They made my introduction to supervision painless and a pleasure as they learned quickly, worked fast and never gave any problems. They got on with it, made adjustments when necessary, and were a just a joy to lead.

I’m not sure I’ll carry on learning Ukrainian given Alina is the sole survivor of my “harem” and seems to prefer speaking Russian. But I will say the following in her native tongue (hopefully I've written it correctly), and I hope she and all her former Ukrainian colleagues get the chance to read it.

Шановні Вікторія, Галина, Валентина, Анна, Лідія, Наталія та Міша.

Дякую. З вами було приємно працювати.

Я бажаю тобі успіхів і ніколи не забуду тебе.

Я сподіваюся одного разу відвідати вашу країну. Твій дім. Твоя вільна країна: гей-гей, розвеселимо!

Слава Україні.