Richard Allardice recalls a season working in an kiwifruit orchard and ponders what it taught him about himself
"This is fruitless," I declare to my fellow pruners. They groan and move further away from me. We spend our days hacking the canopy to let in more sun, which will ripen the fruit. Later, after we're long gone, the fruit will be sweet enough for other people to eat. The beating of my heart is replaced with the rhythm of the loppers, cut and rusty scrape open, cut and rusty scrape open.
Maybe I could get behind this if I at least liked kiwifruit. But alas: They scratch my throat; they chafe and dissolve my skin. And these unholy, prickly balls claw their way into my dreams. Every night I'm lost in a tangle of vines and all I can hear is the leaves shushing and the chop chop o' the loppers. I wake in the dark dawn hours and hope for the pitter patter of rain.
I'll be honest: the gig's really too much for my nascent work ethic. I haven't developed the level of altruism required to prepare kiwifruit for future generations. Yes, I get paid (a little) for my efforts but to be honest, at this point in my life, meandering through uni, I'd sooner have the time and be dead skint. It's not that I'm lazy. Okay, maybe I am a little bit lazy. Aren't we all?
In the hazy heat, my mind wanders to books I read in high school. This is like Z for Zachariah, only instead of trying to escape the utopian valley to the safety of the radioactive wastelands (you'll need to read it for this to make sense), I'm trying to escape the valley of the kiwi, before their sandpapery surfaces grind away my will to live. It's like Day of the Triffids, only the kiwifruit are the marauders, not the murderous walking whippy plants (you'll need to read it – and tell me how it ends, okay?).