The Apple Farm (by Willem Traas) 
In this issue I try to answer the question many people have asked over the years, why did you leave your home country and come to Ireland? Well, that we came to Ireland was a coincidence. It could have been New Zealand or Australia for instance. But why did we leave our home-country? About twenty years ago I began writing little stories. One of these is called My father's Orchard. I think that it gives some kind of answer as to why we left our home-country and did not go back. 


When I go to sleep I go back to the land where I grew up. Back to the village with orchards; to the apple trees, the pear trees, the cherries and the soft fruit, when I was a child some 50 years ago. 
....... It is showery and cold in the early summer and we are trying to harvest the fruit. Somehow we have already forgotten to pick the strawberries but we are now on high ladders in the cherry trees. My father is there with the workers and I am there, 10 years of age, to help. My father needs help. I pick cherries, sort out the cracked and rotten cherries on the grading bench, and with the white horse pulling the cart I bring the cherries away for selling. And the starlings have to be kept out of the crop. Starlings are the biggest curse in cherry growing. 
On a Sunday afternoon I have to hunt the starlings out, on my own. They are coming, in dark flocks landing in the trees, and over the ground they come, stealing in. Starlings feed like gulls, they cut and savage the cherries; sticky red sap is dreeping off the leaves. On some trees there is nothing left but stained leaves and stalks with bare stones. I cycle through the muddy ground, shouting and throwing clods at the starlings and when I think I have them scared away I hear them again in another part of the orchard. 
What a long time an afternoon is for a child. 
I hunt the starlings out very many times but finally let them eat away. Defeated I lie on the grading bench in the centre of the orchard and I hear the fluttering and the screeching of the starlings come nearer and nearer. They are in the tree beside me now; I can see their eyes and their beaks. I look at them for a while and then all at once I jump up, scream at them, throw my arms up and kick my wellingtons straight off my feet high into the tree. 
The starlings leave for a while. When I sit down on my own, knowing that they will come back, I feel that I am not able and not willing to live like this. I will wait and help my father as much as I can but one day I will leave him. I cannot stay with him for his lifetime. 
My dream changes and my father and myself are now grading apples. It is November and we are standing in my father's half-broken down barn (I broke down that barn in the last year of his life) and I am thinking whether I could rebuild it.... 
I wake up and the taste of gall is in my mouth and I can only visualise the dark space around me as if I was on the loft in the old house of my childhood. With the planks above and the big beam, the. window to my left and the opening to the stairs that should be closed with a trapdoor... I force myself to switch on the light and go downstairs and drink a cup of warm milk. Back in bed I pray, with difficulty, for myself and my father who is dead. And slowly hope is coming back to me: 
My father and myself walk in the flowering cherry orchard. The ground underneath is as neat as a kitchen- garden and two doves rise and dive above the trees. It is evening and we are unafraid. My father says in our own dialect: "Everything is o.k. Wim; I know that you always did your best". My father talks with me and does not lean on me now. He asks me "How are your boys Wim, Conny and Henri? And how is Alie (Alie is my wife)? Will you be good to them?". 
It is almost morning and I keep thinking how can my father have changed so much. In his last three months, when he suffered on his own he must have found the answer to loneliness. 
"It is o.k. Wim' and though tears trickle warmly over my temples I see the two of us walking in the orchard where there is not a hill within hundreds of miles. But through the screen of blossoming branches and big reddish stems of old familiar cherry trees, there is a faint outline of mountains. 
I left you father in your orchard and could not come back.
Please do not withhold me your blessing. 

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