Richard Williamson's Country Life Column: September 15, 2005

Stooking! Nobody knows what this means today and children are not even allowed to work in the fields. Father cursed the thistles in the corn. There were no pesticides, you see. He and mother used to pull the thistles by hand, or the farm labourers as they were called, the old fellows who couldn't fight the war, would "spud" the thistles in the spring with a small, hooked trowel on a long handle, prising that long, nasty root out of the ground like a bad tooth.

But many were missed, and they went through the 1890s McCormick binder, imported from America half a century earlier, and were bound with barley into tight bundles with hemp binder twine, that unrolled from its rusty metal drum like gold spaghetti, smelling of linseed.

The bundles, which the binder expelled with a sudden paroxysm of whirling metal spikes and springs and levers, were called stooks. You picked up one in each hand, tucked them under your arms and set them together firmly upright so that the September gales wouldn't knock them over again.

Full column in West Sussex Gazette, September 15