“We do not pick the bottom row. My father did not pick it. The factor asks me every year why the crop is short and I tell him the ground is poor there, and the ground is not poor there.”
As the hop valleys tell it among themselves
Every September the factor asks at Bearsted why the crop is short, and every September the oast-dryer tells him the ground is poor at the bottom of the garden. Her father did not pick it either. The ground there is not poor. The bottom row stands in poles and in crop in the wet lower corner, and in the fourth week of the picking nobody goes down to it. The crop rots where it hangs.
The valley does not say what walks there. It says when: the fourth week of the season and the fifth, and never in August. It says where: around the huts and the drying grounds, and never around the drink. There is a row of huts nobody will take twice, a path the children are called off, and a dog that will not go into one garden once the poles are down. At Yalding a hop-ward said so aloud once. The planter sent him to the vicar, and the vicar sent him to nobody, and the valley took the lesson.
About once in fifteen years, the older pickers say, it cannot be managed at all. Then the Grey Nails are sent for, because they come in a day, and whatever they do is done before anybody from outside arrives. The families who were in that garden ask to be put somewhere else the next year, and they are, and nobody asks why.
What is known
The pattern gathers in the fourth and fifth weeks of the picking, around the huts and drying grounds. The county’s explanation is that the hop valleys are among the oldest worked ground in Kent, that huts have stood in the same places for a hundred and fifty seasons, and that deaths in the season have put people into ground never consecrated. Three hundreds keep a burial fund for pickers, the oldest opened in 4498 after a season that killed four. The huts are lit, four parishes of the Len ring a bell at the end of the fourth week, and the row is left unpicked in two places.
About once in fifteen years the Grey Nails are called. At Bearsted the planter now offers twenty-two pounds with keep for a party of six to watch the row through the fourth and fifth weeks. Outside the hop valleys nothing of the kind is told.