Text: Wang Shuang
"Education must serve proletarian politics and must be combined with productive labour. This sentence in "Chairman Mao's Quotations" was a slogan that was necessary on the wall of almost every school in that era, and even there were two "labor" lessons in the curriculum of primary school students.
【Supporting agricultural labor】
At that time, schools in rural areas had at least one "school field". After the land was planted, the students were afraid that livestock and poultry would harm the seedlings, so they arranged for the students to take turns to suspend classes to protect the seedlings. When the crops grow up, it is time to plant seedlings, and only one strong seedling is left if a few seedlings grow, and the others should be pulled out. There were no herbicides that year, so we had to shovel the grass three times. In the summer and autumn, the class requires students to pick up grass seeds after returning home from school, which are dried by the class and sold to the purchasing station of the supply and marketing cooperative, and the money is used as class fees. In the fall, the school fields are harvested by the senior students, and the harvested crops are carried back to the school playground one by one. After the winter, the class needs to draw firewood for the stove, and each student has the task of pulling bean stubble before the winter freezes. Everyone has the task of picking up manure in the school field - in the cold winter, we get up early and late on the road to pick up livestock manure, and then no matter how far away your home is from the school, we have to carry it to the school in a basket to make manure for the school field.
Throughout the year, students have little time to spare, but this is only on campus. There are also spring ploughing holidays, summer hoeing holidays, and autumn harvest holidays – collectively known as farm holidays, during which students have to return to their production teams to participate in labor. In addition, the school organizes students to collectively go to the production team to support the agricultural work, and we are used to calling this kind of agricultural support labor "support".
The first time I participated in support was when I was in the second grade of elementary school. After four classes at school that day, the teacher said that we would go to the production team to support in the afternoon, and then we lined up, sang revolutionary songs, and set off under the leadership of the teacher. When we arrived in the field of the production team, we learned that our labor task was to grow rice seedlings. Each person is responsible for one ridge, and when the buds of this ridge are finished in the ground, they will row the ridges again. When it was past the end of the school day, we were tired and hungry, hoping that the teacher would announce the end of school early. However, it was not until the evening that the teacher and the person sent by the production team to lead the team discussed a few words before the school was announced. I took several stops on my way home that day, and I felt that the bag on my shoulder was much heavier than usual.
The first support gave us a taste of the hardships of labor.
Later, it was common to have classes in the morning and support in the afternoon. As the saying goes, three springs are not as busy as one autumn. When we harvest buds in autumn, we often support them all day, even for several days.
After breakfast, we took out all the books in our school bag, put the spoon into an empty lunch box and put it in the school bag, and after carrying it, we didn't have to go to school, and went directly to the production team that the teacher told us to support the day before. The meeting place is usually at the production team's team headquarters, which we used to call "horse feeding station", which also shows the status of horses in agricultural production at that time. At about eight o'clock, the students should have arrived, and then the captain led us to the field. The teacher followed behind us, looking back from time to time to see if there were any students who had arrived late.
The buds to be picked up in the field have all been cut, and they are arranged in an orderly manner. The captain is mostly a shrewd farmer, and he is able to allocate a few people reasonably according to the number of people and the total number of tasks, but usually in teams of two. However, none of us wanted to do a little more, no matter how many people were in a group, we had to divide them in a circular way, and it was up to luck to spread out the big or small piles. Among the classmates, there are those who can do work, and there are those who are not very good at work, some are quite capable and some are not very capable, and some have good physical strength, and some are not so good. Therefore, there will be an obvious difference between fast and slow, but at the end of the morning, the teacher will mobilize everyone to pick up the slow one, and then go back to the production team for lunch together.
Lunch is usually eaten at the feeding station, because the feeding station has a large pot of feed. When the food is good, it may be a big pot of stewed tofu, and the next time it may be a big pot of cabbage soup. Nine times out of ten, the staple food is stewed sorghum rice, which is soft or hard, and who is not hungry after a morning's work? But the teacher will definitely have a separate small stove, and the teacher will have a drink after the students leave in the evening.
My cousin, who is in high school, said that they had gone to a very poor production team far away to support them, and they went with their luggage, ate and lived in a local villager's house, and only came back three days later......
At that time, the school did not pay any attention to the cultural curriculum of the students. In the course that fell, the teacher gave a surprise lecture on arithmetic before the holiday, and if the Chinese textbook was not finished, he concentrated on learning new words. It doesn't matter if you learn it or not, and it doesn't matter if you do well or badly on the final exam. I remember a teacher who said in a lecture: "If you study well, you can't eat it, and the children in the crop yard can't do the crop work.
【Dedo-pun】
Billet is an adobe brick made of grass and mud mixed together, which is the main material for building houses and courtyard walls in rural areas in Northeast China in the last century.
At that time, there were no brick houses in the countryside, and every household was mud and straw houses, which were characterized by being economical, warm in winter and cool in summer.
There are three ways to build the earthen wall of the mud and straw house: one is the stacking wall, the material is wet soil and bean stalks, after stirring, lay a layer, tamp it, lay another layer, and then tamp it...... The wall is characterized by being strong. The second is to weave the wall, the material is mud and grain grass, the grain grass is dipped in mud and woven into mud braids, arranged and woven according to a fixed technique, and the characteristics of the wall are to keep warm. The third is the wall, the material is adobe and wet soil, each layer of wet soil is a layer of adobe, and then stepped on solid, the characteristics of the wall are regular. Because the soil in the northeast is relatively scattered, the wall is afraid of being washed by rain, so it is necessary to wipe the wall, that is, to plaster the wall with loess mud mixed with grass.
Houses built with adobe save time and trouble, so most of them are adobe houses, and it is not uncommon to see people taking off adobe.
Blank removal is generally to choose the time after planting or hanging hoe relatively idle, the location should be a flat and spacious place, if it is closer to the big bubble is more convenient, the soil and water used are local materials.
When removing the blank, first mix the grass and soil that are chopped into two or three inches long, pour water and stuff for a while, the grass is soft, and the soil is sticky, so use the two-tooth hook to continuously stir and make the water, grass and soil further evenly bonded together. The decapitated mud should be as dry as possible, which is easy to form and easy to dry.
Wipe the inside of the wooden blank mold with water, place it on the flat ground, fill it with mud, tamp the four corners, and smooth the surface of the blank with water, and then take off the mold, and a piece of adobe is made.
If it is a sunny day, the blank will be almost dry in two or three days, and then the adobe will be turned over and dried. When the adobe is dry, pile up a pile of flowers with a gap in the middle for ventilation, but also in case of rain, cover it with some grass or an old mat or something.
There are two kinds of adobe, black adobe and loess adobe, black adobe is used to build house walls, and loess adobe is used to pave the face of kang. Even if the black adobe of the wall is broken in half, it can be used, but the loess adobe used to make the face of the kang must be complete. In order to make the heat of the soil kang come up quickly, the kang surface blank should be thinner than the wall blank. But it has to be pinched on the kang hole, and it needs to be strong, so two wooden sticks are added in the middle of the billet, commonly known as billet bones, to increase the strength of the billet.
Removing the blank is a heavy and tiring work, and one of the "four tiredness" of the Northeast folk song is "taking off the blank".
With the improvement of rural living standards, there are fewer and fewer earthen houses, replaced by all brick houses. If you come to a remote countryside and occasionally see an old adobe house, it makes people feel intimate and make people feel like they have returned to the past.
【Cannon Collapse River Soil】
"Crops and flowers are all made by dung. "When I was a kid, I used to hear adults say that. In that era of "agricultural science village", chemical fertilizers were not as widely used as they are now, and the seeds were only selected from the previous year's grain and the kernels were relatively full. Therefore, if you want to produce from the land, you can only find a way to do it with manure.
Growing up in the countryside, I remember three ways to accumulate manure: first, human and animal manure, which is collected by the full-time manure collector of the production team, and collected on the large manure heap of the production team; second, green manure is pressed and the cut artemisia grass is thrown into a stagnant ditch, and the soil is pressed on top to let it rot to make fertilizer in the next year; third, in the middle of winter, when the farmers are slack, the frozen river bottom soil in the low-lying part of the meadow is dug down and transported to the crop field to replenish nutrients to the land.
In the winter of the Northeast, the ground freezes almost one person deep, and taking the river subsoil is the most powerful work in the countryside, and it is necessary to use a special pickaxe to plan. The wooden handle of that kind of big pickaxe is as thick as an adult's arm, and a big pickaxe weighs 30 pounds, and a strong laborer can only dig down one side of the river bottom soil in a day. So, the captain arranged for people to fry the fertilizer to a certain temperature to make soil explosives, and set off the cannon to collapse the river bottom soil.
Once, I carried a basket of dirt to pick up dung on the dianzi and saw a group of members digging the bottom of the river. My second uncle took an iron drill and cut a hole in the bottom of the frozen layer, saying that he was going to fire a cannon. At this time, Zhao Banlazi came from the tunzi like a child, it turned out that he was holding a freshly made explosives bag wrapped in kraft paper, and the outside was tied with hemp blanks, which was very strong, and there was a fuse at one end, which was a detonator. Liu ran an errand and took it from Zhao Banlazi's arms, and then pushed it into the hole that the second uncle had picked out, and just put it in. Then he lit a cigarette, took a hard puff, and shouted, "Withdraw!"
People started running in the direction of Tunzi, and I quickly picked up the dirt basket and ran as well, but not as fast as the adults. The second uncle who caught up picked up my earthen basket, and I ran with him. My second uncle asked me as he ran, "Is this basket of dung worth or is your life worth it?" I smiled and said, "Dung is not worth much, I'm afraid it will destroy my basket." ”
We stood at the entrance of the village a hundred meters away and looked at Dianzi, and Liu ran errands and then ran back. After waiting for less than a minute, there was a "boom", the ground trembled, and the clumps of soil were more than 30 meters high, and then they crackled and fell, and some small clods of earth fell to our feet.
At that time, I heard from the adults that there was a production team in the distance that had a squib when the subsoil of the river collapsed, and there was no movement for a long time, so I sent someone to check. As a result, when the people arrived, the cannon suddenly exploded again, and the people were killed. So I thought, in the future, when the cannon collapses the subsoil, I really have to stay away.
【Greedy Black Fight】
Playing is to threshh crops on the field after harvesting.
In the sixties and seventies of the last century, when the cultivated land in the rural areas was collectively owned by the production teams, agricultural mechanization was still far from popularized, and spring planting, summer hoeing, autumn harvesting, and winter storage all depended on manpower. Especially during the period of rushing for farming, the labor force was tight, so the captain mobilized men, women and children to go together. In winter, it is cold, and in addition to processing points, sometimes in the middle of the night, it will also serve dinner. Processing points, for a child, there is no temptation, if there is a night of dinner, it will be tempting.
One day, I heard that I was going to participate in the night dinner, but by the time I finished my homework, fed the chickens, hugged the firewood, and finished the odd jobs at home, it was already dark. I think that if I go again at this time, people will laugh at me for mixing rice, so it is better to go directly to mix at the beginning of the meal. I brought a bowl from home and hid it in the snow near the feeding station to mark it.
The courtyard was brightly lit, and the brigade gave a deafening clatter to the transferred bud rice thresher, and a group of women picked up the bud rice sticks into the earthen basket on the side of the bud rice building, and the male members transported them back and forth to the machine, and one person on each side of the machine was responsible for filling the bud rice sticks into the machine. A few children who were older than me used a sack next to the machine to take off the bud rice sticks, and then loaded most of the bags and carried them to the firewood column of the production team not far away.
At the innermost part of the yard, the owner of the car led a few big horses pulling stones in a row, crushing them in a circle on top of the sorghum ears that were laid out in a large circle, a bit like the eagles and chickens we used to play......
I had been on the haystack, and then I was a little sleepy, and I don't know if I was asleep, and suddenly I heard people's noise. I sat up and took a closer look, and it turned out that the threshing machine was broken, and the electrician was disassembling the machine. People also took this time to take a break, and some went to the house to smoke.
After a while, the machine started to bang again, and it was busy again. I was sleepy, hungry, and a little cold, so I stamped my feet under the haystack and reminded myself that I should call it a day and start eating after a while.
Finally, when I finished work, I hurried to the snow to pick out the bowl, and then went to the straw stack to break two thin straws to make chopsticks. Then pull down the cotton hat, the cat's waist mixed to the front of the rice team, aiming at the big spoon in the hand of the person who served the rice for everyone, at the moment when the bowl was not set I reached under the spoon in time, when he found out that I was mixed rice, it was too late to stop, a big spoon of rice had been buckled into my bowl. I grimaced, and he couldn't help but laugh. Not to mention the public's food, even if it is his family's, it is impossible to take back the rice that was put in the bowls of other people's children.
Holding a bowl of rhubarb rice, squeezed to the innermost table with a slightly dim light, and there was a large pot of hemp seed tofu in the middle of the table, which was particularly fragrant. It is said that it is easy to get confused after eating too much hemp seed tofu, and I was so sleepy that I couldn't stand it and couldn't go home after eating, so I fell asleep on the kang at the horse feeding station. The fourth grandfather said, "Get up and pee and go to sleep." "I was so sleepy that I couldn't open my eyes, and I pushed the door in a daze to pee, but instead of going outside, I urinated into the mill in the outhouse of the horse feeding station. Someone said, "How can you eat this tomorrow by grinding soy milk to make tofu?" and everyone was laughing. The fourth grandfather said: "The boy urines to cure the disease, it's good not to ask you for urine money!"
I lay down on the kang at the horse feeding station and fell asleep.
【Blacksmith Furnace】
In the early years, almost every rural brigade had a blacksmith furnace.
A piece of iron passed through several hot temperatures in the furnace, and in the hammering of the master blacksmith, it was forged into a hoe, a shovel, a two-toothed hook, a sickle, and so on.
There was nothing unusual to see in the countryside, so my friends and I went to the blacksmith's furnace to see the iron. In my memory, the apprentice pulled the bellows and blew the flames that were rising in the stove, and the charcoal fire of the stove burned irregular scrap metal. At this time, the blacksmith used pliers in his left hand to clamp out the red-hot iron rod, and in his right hand held a small hammer, the apprentice wheeled the sledgehammer, and the two of them "clanked" and sparked......
When the iron rod lost its red light, it was thrown into the furnace and continued to burn. The bellows were pulled up again, and when the iron in the stove was red again, the two of them began to "clank" again.
Later, I learned that striking iron is a very technical job, in addition to physical strength, but also to stand firm and see accurately. Especially apprentices, where the master's hammer hits, your sledgehammer has to keep up. Iron should not be burned too much and not underfired, especially the method of dipping the fire, there is a lot of exquisiteness.
In that era when the tail of capitalism was cut, trading was speculation, so I didn't understand the existence of blacksmith furnaces, and some necessary agricultural tools could be bought in the supply and marketing cooperatives. Later, I realized why the countryside could not do without the blacksmith furnace, because you had to go to the blacksmith furnace to hang the hands of cattle and horses.
Horseshoes are divided into large, medium, and small sizes depending on the size of the horse's hooves. The iron is first beaten into iron bars, then broken into sections, bent into the shape of a horse's hoof, and after it is burned red, a row of eyes with horseshoes are punched.
It is necessary to first lead the horse into a large wooden frame, so that it can not kick and plane, hang the hoof that needs to be hung with a rope, put it on a strong stool, pry off the old horse's shoe that has been thinned and damaged, pull out the old nails on it, and then use a quick knife to cut off the old keratin on the hoof, and then put on the new horseshoe, and nail it with a special iron nail.
For horses, it is very important to hang their palms. The horseshoe iron protects the horse's hooves and plays a non-slip and wear-resistant role. The skilled blacksmith hangs up quickly and well, and the horse does not hurt or make trouble. If it is not hung well, the horseshoe nail will be hit into the flesh of the horse's shoe, the horse will hurt, it will be dishonest, and it will not be able to walk with strength.
In the past, the horse-feeding stations of the production team were all large courtyards of the courtyard. In the middle of the square is usually a stove house and a mill for cooking fodder, and on one side is a large fire kang that doubles as a conference room, and on the other side is a warehouse for seeds and small farm tools. On one side of the east and west wings is a large farm tool warehouse and mill, and on the other side is a horse pen with about two dozen horses. There is a well in the corner of the yard, a cowshed outside the yard, a grass yard for storing animal feed, and a yard and a house nearby.
Later, with the popularization of agricultural machinery, there were fewer and fewer horses in the countryside, and the blacksmith furnace was also wiped out.
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