Text 1: The onion man, by Martin Walmsley

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

Derek Swales has not had a holiday for eleven years. He cannot go away in summer because of the onions, and he cannot go away in winter because of the onion seeds, which he germinates on a heated mat in his spare bedroom in January. His wife, Pauline, has stopped asking what else is in there.

Derek, 67, grows giant vegetables for competition, and this weekend, at the autumn show in the town’s sports hall, he hopes his onion will be the heaviest in the north of England. It certainly looks like a contender. It is the size of a football, gleaming and golden, and he has driven it here on a cushion on the passenger seat with the seatbelt fastened round it.

The world of giant vegetable growing is friendly on the surface and fiercely competitive underneath. Growers swap jokes and cups of tea, but nobody shares their feeding recipes, and seeds from a champion plant can change hands for surprising sums. Derek admits that in the final weeks before the show he sets an alarm to check his polytunnel at two in the morning. ‘Slugs,’ he says darkly. ‘And other things.’ He will not say what the other things are.

At the weigh-in, the hall goes quiet. Derek’s onion is lowered on to the digital scales by two men in white coats, and the numbers flicker and settle: 7.9 kilos. For a moment nobody speaks. Then the grower before him, who had been leading, walks over and shakes his hand, and Derek, a man who has talked about nothing but onions for an hour, finds that he has nothing to say at all.

It is easy to laugh at men who sit up at night guarding vegetables. I came prepared to laugh. But there is something touching about this level of devotion to a thing that will, in the end, be chopped up and made into soup.

Text 2: The gooseberry show, by From Our Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper report, published in 1879, a correspondent describes the annual show of a gooseberry growers’ society, held at a village inn in the north of England.

Few of our readers, I suspect, are aware of the passion with which the gooseberry is cultivated in certain of our northern villages. On Saturday I attended the annual show of the society which meets at the Black Bull at Thornholme, and I confess I came away with a new respect for that humble fruit.

The members, some forty in number, are for the most part working men: weavers, colliers and labourers, who tend their bushes in small gardens behind their cottages in the hours left to them after the day’s work. Their devotion is extraordinary. One old man told me that he had not slept a whole night through for a month, for fear of birds, of frost and of rival growers, and that he had sat up more than once with a lantern and a stout stick. Another had shaded his finest berry from the sun with a little umbrella of his own manufacture, and supported it from beneath upon a saucer, lest its weight should tear it from the stalk.

The weighing took place in the long room of the inn, upon a pair of brass scales of great delicacy, the berries being weighed in pennyweights and grains as though they were gold. Each was laid in the pan with the utmost care, and the silence while the balance settled was such that one might have heard a pin fall. The prize for the heaviest berry, a copper kettle, fell to a young weaver whose fruit, a great red monster, weighed above thirty pennyweights, and he was carried round the room upon the shoulders of his friends.

The evening concluded with a substantial supper and many songs. It may be said that this is a great deal of trouble to take over a gooseberry. Perhaps so. But I have seen men take more trouble over worse things, and I did not see a happier company all year.

Both of these texts are about people who grow fruit and vegetables for competitions.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the growers and their competitions
• how the writers present the growers to readers

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