Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland’s contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast.
Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind.
Harry Ferguson’s first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat.
Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors.
However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and started to produce a new Ford 8N tractor, using the Ferguson system. Ferguson ’s open and cheerful nature was no match for the ruthless mentality of the American businessman. The matter was decided in court in 1951. Ferguson claimed $240 million, but was awarded only $9.25 million.
Undaunted in spirit, Ferguson had a new idea. He approached the Standard Motor Company at Coventry with a plan, to adapt the Vanguard car for use as tractor. But this design had to be modified, because petrol was still rationed in the post-war period.
The biggest challenge for Ferguson was the move from petrol-driven to diesel-driven engines and his success gave rise to the famous TE-20, of which more than half a million were built in the UK.
Ferguson will be remembered for bringing together two great engineering stories of our time, the tractor and the family car, agriculture and transport, both of which have contributed so richly to the well-being of mankind.
My father goes to Nottingham for Valentina’s appeal after all. How does she persuade him? Does she threaten to tell the bureaucraczia about oralsex? Does she cradle his bony skull between her twin warheads and whisper sweet nothings into his hearing aid? My father is silent about this, but he has a cunning plan.
They travel to Nottingham by train. Valentina has bought herself a hew outfit for the occasion; it is a navy suit with a pink polyester silk lining that matches her lipstick and fingernails. Her hair is piled up on top of her head in a yellow beehive, secured with a clip and sprayed with lacquer to hold it in place. My father wears the same suit he wore at his wedding and a crumpled white shirt with a frayed collar and the two top buttons sewn on with black thread. On his head he wears a green peaked cap which he refers to as his ‘lordovska kepochka’ (meaning ‘cap as worn by aristocracy’) which he bought in the Co-op in Peterborough twenty years ago. Valentina trims his hair with the kitchen scissors to tidy him up a bit, straightens his tie, and even gives him a peck on the cheek.
They are ushered into a cheerless beige-painted room where two men in grey suits and a woman in a grey cardigan sit behind a brown table on which are some sheafs of paper and a decanter of water with three glasses. Valentina is called to speak first, and is taken through a series of questions in which she details how she and my father met at the Ukrainian Club in Peterborough, how they fell in love at first sight, how he wooed her with poems and love letters, how they were married in church, and how happy they are together.
When it is my father’s turn to speak, he asks in a quiet voice whether he may go into a separate room. There is some discussion among the Immigration panel, but their conclusion is that no, he must speak in front of everybody.
“I will speak under duress,” he says. They take him through the same series of questions, and his replies are just the same as Valentina’s. At the end when he has finished he says, “Thank you. Now I want you to record that all I have said is spoken under duress.”
He is taking a gamble on her lack of English.
There is a flurry of note-taking, but none of the panel members looks up for a moment or meets my father’s eye. Valentina raises one eyebrow by a fraction, but maintains her fixed smile.
“What it mean, this dooh-ress word?” she asks him, as they are waiting for the train to take them home.
“It means love,” my father says. “Like the French, tendresse.”
“Ah holubchik. My little pigeon.” She beams, and gives him another peck on the cheek.
Twelve. A half-eaten ham sandwich
“How do you suppose Mrs Z knew about the annulment plan?” Vera asks. Mrs Divorce Expert and Mrs Flog-‘em-and-send-‘em-home are putting their heads together again.
“Valentina must have seen the letter from the solicitor.”
“She’s going through his mail.”
“Looks like it.”
“I must say, with her devious criminal bent, I’m not in the least surprised.”
“It’s a game two can play.”
Next time we visit, I abandon Mike to field the tractor monologues in the apple-filled sitting-room, while I disappear upstairs to rummage through Valentina’s room. She has taken over the room which used to be my parents’ bedroom. It is a sombre, ugly room with heavy 19505 oak furniture, the wardrobe still full of my mother’s clothes, twin beds with yellow candlewick covers, mauve, yellow and black curtains in a startling modernist design of my father’s choosing, and a square of blue carpet in the middle of the brown lino. To me this room, this inner sanctum of my parents’ relationship, has always been a place of mystery and trepidation. So I am startled to find that Valentina has transformed it into a Hollywood-style boudoir, with pink nylon fur-fabric cushions, quilted and frilled holders for tissue paper, cosmetics and cotton wool, pictures of wide-eyed children on the walls, cuddly toys on the bed, and bottles of perfume, lotions and creams on the dressing-table. It seems they have all come from mail-order catalogues, several of which lie open on the floor.
But the most remarkable thing about the room is the mess. There is a chaos of papers, clothes, shoes, dirty cups, nail varnish, pots of cosmetics, crusts of toast, hairbrushes, beauty appliances, toothbrushes, stockings, packets of biscuits, jewellery, photographs, sweet wrappers, knick-knacks, used plates, underwear, apple cores, sticking plasters, catalogues, wrappings, sticky sweets, all jumbled together on the dressing-table, the chair, the spare bed, and overflowing on to the floor. And cotton wool, everywhere blobs of cotton wool covered with red lipstick, black eye make-up, orange face make-up, pink nail varnish, strewn on the bed, on the floor, trodden into the blue carpet, jumbled up with the clothes and food.
There is a strange odour, a mixture of sickly-sweet scent and industrial chemical, and something else-something organic and bacterial.
Where to start? I realise I don’t know what exactly I’m looking for. I reckon I have an hour before Valentina gets back from work, and Stanislav gets home from his Saturday job.
I start with the bed. There are some photos, a few official-looking papers, an application for a provisional driver’s licence, a?45 from her job at the nursing-home (I notice that the surname is spelt differently on both documents), an application form for a job at McDonald’s. The photographs are interesting-they show Valentina in a glamorous off-the-shoulder evening gown, elaborately coiffed, standing beside a dark stocky middle-aged man who is a couple of inches shorter than she. Sometimes he has his arm around her shoulder; sometimes they hold hands; sometimes they smile at the camera. Who is the man? I study the picture closely, but it does not look like Bob Turner. I pick one of the photos and slip it into my pocket.
Under the bed, in a Tesco’s carrier bag, I make my next discovery: it is a bundle of letters and poems in my father’s crabbed hand. Interspersed with the letters and poems, someone has supplied an English translation. My darling…beloved…beautiful goddess Venus…breasts like ripe peaches (for goodness’sake!)…hair like the golden wheat fields of Ukraina…all my love and devotion…yours until death and beyond. The handwriting of the translations looks like a child’s, with large rounded letters, and the i’s dotted with little circles. Stanislav? Why would he do this? Who is the intended reader of these translations? One of the letters, I notice, has numbers as well as words. Curious, I pull it out. My father has set out his income, giving details of all his pensions and all his savings accounts. The spidery numbers crawl up and down the pages. It is a modest amount, but enough to live comfortably, and all will be yours, my beloved, he has written at the bottom. All this has been neatly transcribed in the childish hand.
I read it through again, my irritation rising. My sister is right-he is a fool. I should not blame Valentina for taking his money-he has more or less thrust it upon her.
Now I turn my attention to the drawers. Here the same chaos prevails. I sift through the jumble of underwear, outerwear, sticky sweet wrappers, bottles of lotions, cheap perfume.
In one drawer, I find a note. “See you on Saturday. All my love, Eric.” Beside it, buried in a pair of knickers, is a half-eaten ham sandwich, its crusts grey and curled back, the pink dark-dry sliver of ham poking out obscenely.
At that moment, I hear the sound of a car pulling up. Quickly, I sneak out of Valentina’s room and into Stanislav’s. This used to be my room, and I still keep some things in the wardrobe, so I have an excuse to be there. Stanislav is tidier than Valentina. It does not take me long to realise that he is a fan of Kylie Minogue and of Boyzone. This ‘musical genius’ has a roomful of tapes of Boyzone! On the table under the window are some school books, and a writing pad. He is writing a letter in Ukrainian. Dear Daddy…
Then I realise there are two new voices-it is not Mike and my father, it is Valentina and Stanislav talking to each other in the kitchen. I close Stanislav’s door behind me quietly and tiptoe downstairs. Valentina and Stanislav are in the kitchen poking at some boil-in-the-bag delicacies bubbling away on the cooker. Under the grill, two shrivelled sausages are starting to smoke.
“Hallo Valentina. Hallo Stanislav.” (I’m not sure of the etiquette here: how are you supposed to talk to someone who is beating up your father, and whose room you have been rifling through? I opt for the English way: polite conversation.) “Had a hard day at work?”
“I always working hard. Too much hard,” Valentina replies grumpily. I notice how fat she has grown. Her stomach has swelled like a balloon, and her cheeks have stretched and bulged. Stanislav, on the other hand, seems to have grown thinner. My father is lurking in the doorway, emboldened by Mike’s presence.
“Sausages burning, Valentina,” he says.
“You no eating, you shut up mouth.” She flicks a wet tea-towel in his direction.
Then she throws the boil-in-bags on to a plate and slits them with a knife, spewing out their indeterminate contents, slaps the sausages down beside them, splatters some ketchup on top, and stomps back up to her bedroom. Stanislav follows mutely.