Thirty-two accounts of vanishing rural tasks — from setting hens and thatching roofs to baking bread and village weddings.
The chapter is a small encyclopaedia of rural everyday life over the past seventy years — thirty-two short accounts of tasks that have now vanished. Step by step the author shows how hens were set and chicks reared, roofs thatched and mats woven, timber felled and hauled, cows grazed, brooms, baskets and "kipki" made, fruit dried and oil pressed.
Here too are the ways of heating rooms, washing and ironing clothes, preserving meat, brewing small beer and making beet syrup; lighting by paraffin lamp, sanding the floor, hunting the Colorado beetle, the wired loudspeaker on the wall, the night watch, cartage and communal labour, the slaughtering of pigs, baking bread in a special oven, building fences from branches, and village weddings. It is a record of knowledge preserved nowhere else in such detail.