My farm life
In the farms and in the fields people are forced to live a very lonely life, it might be okay for an old man like the one in the photo, but for a very young man it is a very lonely and perhaps even sad if you have to live there most of your life.
My farm life
Welcome to my hub
(6), my farm life experience
Dear readers, this
article is the continuation of our last article ‘an old man story’, where I was
continuing to tell you about my real life story, so, this article is another
chapter of my life story and there will be several more to come later on, as we
go on writing them and editing them, therefore, let us continue to tell you about
my life story.
As we all know, our lives sometimes are full
of many surprises, sometimes those surprises may be good and other times they
might not be that good, but we have to live our lives the best way we can
whenever and wherever we happen to live at the time when those life events
happen.
Looking back at my
own life at the time when I was young, I believe that there are times in our
lives when we might not even know whether the way that we are living our lives
is good or bad for us, and we will discover that life value much later in our
lives; because what we have been doing during our early lives may well take us
to a destiny that we had never thought could happen to us, as we have pointed
out in our previous sub-article, perhaps we have our own destiny. Having said
that, now let us talk about our lives that we have lived, and let us see what
we think today about the life that we have already lived; therefore, let me
continue to tell you the story of my life, as I have started telling you in our
previous articles of, an old man life story.
So, dear readers,
as I have said this hub is a continuation of our first farm life experience of,
an old man life story, here we are going to add a few more descriptions about
my farm life when I was a kid, or a very young man. I have to say, that from my
own point of view, there are reasons to believe that once you have read my farm
life story that I am writing here, you are going to agree with me that the way
of life that I had, including some of those other youths, who had to live like
me during those old times in the farms, it was a way of life that to most of us
nowadays may seem archaic, unreal and to say the least unfair, and indeed it
was really unfair to myself and to all those youths that ended up in a similar
position as myself in their small family farms.
But at the time
when this happened it did not seem that bad to us while we were there, because
we were so young when we started to work in the farms, so, we didn’t know and
everybody else thought that this sort of life had been practised from our
forebears for many generations before us, therefore we were not aware then of
the adverse influence that it could and would brink to us in the future, as we
didn’t know then that we were placed in a disadvantaged situation and even our
parents did not see how bad the situation could become to some of us, because
they could not see how fast life was going to change, and even if they did
guess that things were going to change very rapidly, they didn’t know what else
to do, since nobody knew in those times anything else, except that they had to
follow the previous generations. So let us talk about this unfair situation
that we were in at the farms in those old times.
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Farm life unfair situation
The farm life
unfair situation
Now, this situation
that I am talking about here was most unfair to us youths, because it affected
only us in the farms, but not all the young citizens of this somewhat rich
rural town of Genzano di Lucania, because they would be living a better life in
town; (Here rich rural town means only Genzano town, by comparison to other
rural towns of southern Italy that surround it).
So, as it happened
then, we a portion of the young citizen of Genzano became caught in a
disadvantaged position including myself, and this position would affect us very
badly for the rest of our lives; but we didn’t know then that it was going to
be a disadvantaged position for us in the future, and we did not know what else
to do either, and there was nothing that could be done either. The few
exceptions who were not put at a great disadvantaged position were those youths
which their families were rich enough land owners, because it would always be
an advantage for them to stay in the farms and learn their future trade and
then use their farm knowledge in the future to their advantages, in their own
family farms, if they had a large enough farm to run.
But for the rest of
us young men who were working in small farms like myself, and did not own
enough land to secure a good living in the future, what we were doing then
would turn into a disadvantaged position later on, but at the same time we had
no other opportunities in life but to continue the old tradition of farming,
just because this same tradition of farming had been a way of life to the rural
community of this agricultural town for centuries before us, and therefore,
when I was young it was thought to be the only way to earn a living, if you
happened to own any land at all, so we had to be trained to be farmers in order
to look after our own small farm when we would become older, and anyhow, in
those times there was not much else that could be done, but this helping in the
farm and training to be a farmer for us became a great disadvantage, because of
the changes that followed in farming later on. This way of living that I am
talking about here would be better understood, if you read this other article
that we have written in Hub Pages, Farming today compared to the old way, in this hub we are
describing how farming is changed and other ways of life as well.
Anyhow let us go
back to my main story, now to be fair here I may have to add that there were
also a few other youths that their families were so poor that they were also
working in the farm like us by looking after the farm animals and other small
tasks, they had no land at all, so they worked in the farm just to be fed and a
few other things, or a very small pay, if the farmer could afford that.
Anyhow, nobody
could be blamed for putting us youths in such a position, which in the end
would result for us in a disadvantaged position: because the very same way of
life had served the same community of farming well for centuries, and those
people did not feel disadvantaged and were not disadvantaged at all then, just
because in those times, people used to accept life the way it was, as long as
they had enough food on their table every day and perhaps a few other things,
they were happy. But nowadays because of the enormous change of the modern era,
which has brought with it also changes in the value of work that any worker
does, and for this reason we became greatly disadvantaged. But this is not all,
because there are a lot more that can be said, about the way we became and the
ways that we were treated from the rest of the town community. At this point of
time I want to make this observation, which is that we seem to be born with a
sort of destiny, because we are born in certain families, we follow the same path
of our family, so let us talk about my own destiny.
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My harsh destiny
As I was saying
before, we are born in a family that somehow decides also our destiny, because of
the way that family lives and have lived perhaps for centuries; but there is
more to say about our destiny, because some of us would like to believe that we
are born with a destiny to fulfil, and if it is so, then my destiny is not a
bright one, because from the beginning of my life I have had a hard life and
this has continued during my life, perhaps it will still continue until I die,
but anyhow let us go back to my life story in the farm, whether it was my
destiny or not.
As I have already
mentioned above about my own farm life when I was young, and there I reckon and
feel that it was really unfair to my personal self, and to those youths that
had to live in the farm as I did, this fact of life I will continue to describe
to you at length and in depth as I keep writing on, since the main point that I
want to make here is to show you how I had to struggle and to suffer while I
was living in the farm, and even later on in the future as we will see, from
these articles that I am writing. In fact, for me life was going to be much
harder than I thought, since that way of life which I had lived in the farm had
left me so far backward, because of that isolation that existed in the farms, I
even lacked in local general knowledge about the people of the town, and also
in communication skills including all those nice things that a person says and
does, which would make that same person attractive to the rest of the
community.
Here I have also to
say that this early disadvantaged way of life has affected me greatly for the
rest of my life, and although I have tried to improve myself during my life, I
have never been able to catch up with the rest of the world completely. So
that, I feel it within me even now, as if I will never be completely satisfied
with myself, because I think that I could have been better off, if I had a
different and better way of life when I was young to start with.
But since what’s
been done is done, so, one cannot go back and do it in a different way,
therefore, I am/was stuck with it. Therefore, I had to put up with my backward
way of life; and I had to accept that the only possible way that was left for
me to earn a living for the rest of my life, had to be that I had to do hard
physical work, which I did in a way or another and this hard work has helped me
to overcome some of my drawbacks. From this life experience one could say that
we should always try to improve ourselves and work hard for it, even when it is
hard for us to find an easy way of life, if we are able to keep this attitude and
work hard during our lives, we would be able to overcome many issues that could
otherwise run us down completely.
Now let us continue
to tell my life story; anyhow, at the time when all this hard and boring life
was happening to us, including all those young people which used to live and
work in this town’s farms, doing this same work as I did it all seemed normal
to us, because even our forebears before us did that, as they had all lived
this same way for centuries before us.
As I was saying
also my forbears used to live in this town that I was born, and in which I had
to live my youth just like them. But, most of my youth and I mean the most
important years of my young life, which is the time when a youth would be
better off to stay in a society and learn the ways of that society, and at the
same time try to find out the meanings of life, which would help him to learn
how to deal with his life in the future in the society that we would be living
in; all those years were spent to live in our family farm and not in the town
itself, and this did put me in a disadvantaged position from the very start, as
I have already mentioned before, all because everything in the world was
changing too fast and farming the old way was on the way out.
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Breaking away from my farm life
For about twelve
years I lived this farm life; so, the only time that I had a real break from
farming was when I was called to go in the army, which in Italy was/is a
compulsory service to the country, which every able young male must serve when
one turns twenty-one years old or soon after that. Then when the army released
me I migrated to Australia, and I was then in my early twenties. I was young
and not afraid to do hard work, since I had learned in the farm that we needed
to work hard to earn our living.
But let me say just
a few words about this service in the Italian army of those times, being in the
compulsory Italian army is a hard life for anybody, for a start you are not
paid or you are paid so little that you believe that you are not paid at all;
and then everybody laments about everything especially about the discipline, as
for myself I did not find it very hard like some complain it is, but at the same
time it was, because you do what you are told to do, at the same time you learn
something new because you are exposed to a different way of living. But the
hardest part of it all is that the compulsory army of those times, they didn’t
pay us, we only got free food free clothes and just enough money to by some
cigarettes if one was a smoker. Anyhow it is good to be in the army and learn a
new way of life, it makes you feel better when that is over and done with; some
of the old people think that after you have been in the army, you have really
become a man of the world, because of that extra experience that you learn in
the army.
But, let me go back
to tell you about my life in the farm and what it did to me. Because as I have
already mentioned before, the farm life of those times was not what one would
prescribe for a young man like me, if one wanted me as a young man to develop
my potential properly, so that, I could be ready to meet the challenge of life
when I would be older, in all sorts of communities not just farming a small
farm.
But you see, as we
have already mentioned, at the time when all this happened to me, no one could
have ever thought of the forth coming changing world, and of the difficulties
that I and some of the other boys that shared the same fate as me would have to
face in later life. Just because the way of life happened to change so much and
so fast, when we were young.
Now, in order to
understand how unfair it was for me and for those youths of my time who ended
up in the farms like myself, I have to convey to you the different set up of
this town of Genzano; the way that people separate each other in classes, not
because they like to be different to each other, but because they are
different, and therefore they think and talk in different ways, so they group
themselves with their equal, because they feel more at ease that way: But in
reality they are somehow all equal, as all the groups need each other soon or
later.
There are reasons
to believe that this way of life would usually happen everywhere else in the
world in small towns, where there are two main groups of people in every
community: There are those who live directly from the land, which are called
the rural community, and those who work in town in all sorts of jobs, which would
be called just town’s people and they include; shop keepers, doctors, vets,
craftsmen, clerks, schools and school teachers, priests, policemen,
(carabinieri which are Italian policemen), guardians, and every other sort of
jobs that one can think of, in order to run a town properly; and then all the
rest of the population, like whole families and women and children, so that a
town would be self-reliant.
Anyhow at a certain
stage of my life I started to become aware that I had to break away from this
type of farm living, because a lot of things were changing and we didn’t earn
enough from the small farm that we had, so it was time for us young would have
been farmers to change also, but let me say a bit more about my farm life views
and the town I have come from, so that it would be better for my readers to
understand what was going on at those times, in the fifties and there about.
After all, those old times will not come back anymore, and it would be good to
have at least a sort of record written here, in order to remember how those
times were.
So in my next
article, let me continue to talk about my farm life views, followed by several
other articles about my farm life, and then talk about the town of Genzano and
its communities, to explain better how those times were, in the fifties and
earlier; not only because I want to tell you my life story, but also because a
sort of record is being written and kept, in these internet articles that could
be available to the public for a long time in the future.
So, see you next
time in my next article, my farm life views.
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