March 13, 2003

There's a play showing in the Town Hall Theatre next week, called Tilsonburg. The playwright,
Malachy McKenna (a graduate of NUI Galway), has based the play on his
experiences picking tobacco as a summer job in Tilsonburg, Ontario. It has
already won an award (Stewart Parker Award 2000) but that's not the reason
I'm looking forward to it.



In 1987, I was persuaded by a fellow student to go picking tobacco in Canada (it'll be just like a J1 job, he said. He was mistaken). After an interview in the
Canadian embassy (by Garret Fitzgerald's brother no less), we were chosen. I
suspect that if you were fit enough to walk up the four flights of stairs to the
interview, you were in.




Was it fun? No, it was a complete baaalls. Yes, the weather was beautiful but the
actual business of picking tobacco was as much fun as lugging bales of hay for
six weeks, and took just as much energy. It became clear to us when we
arrived that no local in his right mind would spend the summer harvesting
tobacco (unless he owned the farm). Instead, unsuspecting foreign students (i.e.
mugs like me) and tough looking drifters from Quebec usually did the heavy
lifting.



We were in a village called Otterville (in memory of the otters that were
eradicated to make way for the houses) that was deathly quiet. We worked six
days a week from about 5am to 7pm and were usually too knackered to do
much on the Sunday. Tilsonburg was the nearest town - it had a fleapit cinema
and one single pub (for a town of 12,000 people). It transpired that the only
people who drank in the place were the aforementioned mugs from abroad and
the dodgy looking drifters (who at least knew what they were getting into).
Tilsonburg's claim to fame was that it had the widest street in Ontario, and the
fact that I was told this more than once tells you everything about the level of
excitement in the place.



We were paid about 60 Canadian dollars a day - given the exchange rate at the
time, I'd have been better off selling my own blood by the litre. Nine Irish lads
volunteered that year, we were assigned different farms. Our farmer billeted us
in an old farmhouse in the middle of a field, apologizing for its basic level of
comfort. In it's basement was a washing-machine and dryer that dated from the
early Sixties - where I came from, there wasn't even electricity in the Sixties.



During that summer, I wasn't tempted to take up smoking (all I wanted was
sleep), but every evening I carefully peeled a quarter-inch layer of nicotine (it's
just like black putty) off my arms that had built up from contact with the tobacco
leaves - I'd say I ingested enough tobacco directly through my skin to last a
lifetime.



Anyway, the play is on from the 20th to 22nd of March.


Posted by Monasette at March 13, 2003 11:49 PM
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