Black Harvest by Ann Pilling

was a harsh shriek. The sheer helplessness in it, out of all proportion to what the boy had said, frightened Colin and Prill. It was so unlike their mother. Kevin put out his hand awkwardly. “No, missus, he’s all right, only there was a bit of a blaze you see, in Morrissey’s field. His van nearly went up, and the boy was there. If you could just come…”
    “What on earth made you do it, love?” Mum whispered, taking a cup of tea from Mrs O’Malley. She had to say something, though Oliver’s face was all red and puffy from crying. “If you really thought the old man’s vegetables needed looking at you only had to—” then Mrs O’Malley shook her head and frowned. They’d been through all that once.
    The farmer sat at the kitchen table brooding over his tea. He was a short, stocky man with curly hair like Kevin and a permanently anxious look. He was very grave.
    “Y’see, missus,” he said quietly, “Oliver here thought it was for the best. He thought Donal’s crop had got the potato beetle and that burning the tops off was the surest way to get rid of it.”
    “I tried to tell him,” sniffed Oliver. “He just wouldn’t listen.”
    “I don’t know if the boy was right. There’s nothing left of the plants. It’s a pity you emptied your jar on to the fire, Oliver. I’ll have to report this, you see. I could have shown it to them. Everyone round here will have to be told and put on the alert now. We do get pests from time to time, of course; farmers have to be on the lookout for them. But potato beetle , well that’s more or less a thing of the past with all the modern pesticides. But of course it’s no laughing matter. Let’s hope you were mistaken, anyway.”
    “They weren’t just… big ladybirds, were they, Oll?” Prill said. She was only trying to be helpful.
    “ No ,” he said, with a look of withering scorn. “I know what a ladybird looks like, you know.” And Colin knew they weren’t ladybirds, he’d seen them feasting on green leaves in the middle of the night. But he said nothing.
    There was an embarrassing silence, broken only by Oliver’s sniffing.
    “You see, Oliver,” Mum began again. “What you did was so dangerous, so drastic.”
    “It had to be drastic,” he said, his voice suddenly quite firm again. “Drastic things need drastic cures sometimes.” He sounded like a headmaster.
    “What do you mean?”
    “My father told me all about Ireland, before we came; there was a time when the people went hungry, a million starved to death, they say, because of the bad potato harvests.”
    John O’Malley looked across at him and his face cleared with sudden understanding. “You’re right, Oliver, they did suffer, back in the 1840s, all over Europe, and it was at its worst here in Ireland. But it wasn’t beetle, boy, it was blight. Oh, people still look out for it, even today. Sure, it was a terrible curse.”
    “What’s blight?”
    “Something carried in the air—tiny spores. It attacked the plants and made them go bad, whole fields went rotten, overnight virtually.” He loosened his collar. “Weather like this’d be perfect for it, hot, and a bit sticky. Oh, we think we have a hard time on a tiny farm like this, but I’m telling you, we don’t know we’re born.”
    Nobody said anything, there was such passion in his voice. Sensing the embarrassment, he went on uncertainly. “Perhaps you know all about it anyway, from your history lessons? The Hungry Forties it was called.”
    “No,” Prill said. “We’ve only reached the Normans.” It sounded so pathetic.
    “Old Donal’s the one to ask about what went on round here,” Mrs O’Malley said. “He knows a fair bit of history. Hewas quite a scholar in his day and he’s got all kinds of bits and pieces in that van of his. You’ll have to ask him to show you.”
    “I don’t suppose he’ll ever want to speak to me again,” Oliver said bleakly. He wanted him to, somehow.
    “He will, he will to be