My teenage past — picking dung in winter and picking iron in summer

After two or three years of primary schooling, the school carried out activities to support industrial and agricultural production, calling on students to use their extracurricular time to pick up dung in winter and scrap steel in summer.

Picking scrap iron is still easier to do, after school, three or five classmates together, the family has a bearing car to drag one, no on the broken enamel basin, tied a rope, pull up the clanging. The iron picking site is the factory area north of the construction road, which stretches for more than ten miles and is full of factories, what rolling mills, machine tool factories, smelters. At that time, the management of the factory area was poor, unlike now, the boss looked at the workers like thieves, and the security guards at the door slipped away. At that time outside the factory area, broken copper and iron is more, it is really not OK, take advantage of the doorman does not pay attention, sneak into the factory area, but also harvest richly, then a lot of factory back door even doorman, even walk to play, hot summer, do not feel hot, thirsty to go to the tap to drink a full meal of cold water, do not have to return in the afternoon.

In the winter, in order to collect more fertilizer and grain for the farmer's uncle, we pulled up the manure truck again. It is more difficult to collect dung, the main source is one is horse dung dropped by the carriage into the city, and the other is human dung. It is not easy to pick up horse manure, the cars come and go, they are crushed when they fall, and the fat water does not flow to the fields of outsiders, and the ass of the carriage into the city is still hanging on the dung pocket. Human dung is also difficult to find, not at that time people talk about civilization, mainly cold weather, counting nine cold days, outside convenient frozen buttocks, at that time there were no migrant workers, the floating population was also small. Picked up for a few days, found the doorway, the bungalow area has a lot of feces, because the toilets in that place are outdoors, there are many people in the morning toilet, catch up with which internal emergency does not squat, just find the horn to solve. You found the doorway, other students also found, a few days later, the supply is still insufficient, to pick up feces to get up early, the north wind smoke and snow, children who do not want to get out of the hot bed. The older children in the fifth and sixth grades came up with a way to start digging up the septic tank, which was simple and solved the task of fattening throughout the winter at once. Pry open the manhole cover of the cesspool, borrow a spoon to take out the manure, fish out the dirt with the soup with water, go to the wall, freeze the hard state the next day, and then smash it into several pieces with a pickaxe, and transport it to the school to ensure that the task is exceeded.

We are young and can't do such a job, so we can only beg our senior classmates to join us and take one. That day, the manhole cover in the yard was pried open, a large pool of manure was fished out, and the next day it was frozen and solid. I was planning to knock on the door and send it to the school, but I heard that the rural villagers had gone to the school to pull away all the fertilizer accumulated by the students, and the school would not accept it this year.

This pained a few of our children, the dirt froze there, the big students did not care, and we could not move. In the spring, a pool of sewage flows, the smell is stinking, and the neighbors complain.

After two years, the school called for fly hunting, we went into the public toilet again, went to the garbage room, carried a fly to stir the neighbors, and let the toilet people scold from time to time.

I was born stupid, and I was always doing these activities in a down-to-earth manner, and I never got a reward for completing a task once. Xinghua, a classmate in the class, went to the school to pay the results of the fly extermination battle, took the sheep by the hand and stole a large bottle of dead flies, turned around and handed it over, and won the first place in the school to kill flies. But things got big, the school wanted to praise him, let him go to the conference to talk about the use, this time Xinghua panicked, one is clumsy, will not say, second, when stealing flies, many people see, once exposed, the consequences are unimaginable. In those days, Xinghua saw that everyone was smiling and repeatedly looking for the teacher to be modest. Later, the school felt that Xinghua was also mud on the wall, only gave him a notebook, and pulled it down with a word.

The ancients said that spring has a hundred flowers and autumn has a moon, summer has a cool breeze and winter has snow. But when we were teenagers, we picked up dung in winter and picked iron in summer.