(Smallholders farming 5-1 hold*)
Almost three-quarters of the smallholdings of Tard are between 1 and 5 holds and almost half of them are less than one hold. Smallholders farming less than 5 holds form the bulk of the peasantry of Tard, they are in the majority, and their sons and daughters are seasonal jobbing labourers. Their diet is typical of Tard. These people exhibit, in a crystal clear and concentrated way, the typical dietary deficiencies. According to a rough expert estimate, what food they eat barely provides half of the required calories. A substantial number eat foodstuffs almost exclusively based on wheat. This is where dry bread begins to serve as breakfast, midday and evening meal. If their circumstances are not so bad, the typical bill of fare is: noodle soup, a main dish made with noodles, bread, which all means approximately the same thing in various forms. Here the role of bacon in the diet begins to diminish, meat disappears completely, while sausage and black and white pudding rarely appear; these people never drink milk, see butter perhaps once a year, and eggs are rarely on the table of those who raised the chickens. The children’s sprawling handwriting bespeaks hopeless poverty, the oppressive reek of mud walls and dirt floors, hard lives due to overcrowding, toil and struggle, too much work and not enough food. These bills of fare in themselves account for and cast light on the statistical figures that demonstrate that the death rate from TB is much higher in Tard than in the neighbouring villages, that congenital weakness is a direct and exceedingly frequent cause of infant mortality, and a weakening of the constitution is as frequently the indirect cause of adult mortality.
An eleven-year-old girl, daughter of a smallholder working four holds, gives the following account of what she eats: “I do not eat meat because there isn’t any.” She describes her weekly diet: “On Monday I ate bread and bacon for breakfast. Midday I ate bread. I usually eat three times a day. On Tuesday morning I ate bread and bacon, midday I ate bread, and in the evening noodle soup. Wednesday morning I ate bread, midday bread and in the evening potato noodles. Thursday morning I ate bread, midday meat soup, in the evening I had bread. Friday morning I ate bread, midday bean soup, in the evening bread. Saturday I ate bread, midday noodle soup, in the evening bread. Sunday I ate bread and bacon, midday meat soup, in the evening bread.”
Here, even on Sunday, the evening meal is dry bread. Variety is provided by meat soup, bean soup, flour-based dishes, and dripping. Children seen munching large slices of bread, after a cursory glance easily misjudged as greedy and insatiable by visitors, are in fact eating their main meal, and it is on bread that the hard-working parents subsist. It counts almost a feast if there is some fat to go with it, and a veritable feast if there is sausage to accompany it.
The little girl whose father farms two holds, had bread for breakfast, noodles midday and bread in the evening on a given day. The following day she had scones with bread—as the more well-to-do have bread and bacon—for breakfast, bread and bacon midday, and in the evening thick brown soup made of flour. On Thursday she had bread and boiled cabbage for breakfast, bread midday, and potato soup in the evening. On Friday she had bread and sorrel for breakfast, bread midday. She writes: “I didn’t eat eggs, not once. I did not eat eggs because my mother hasn’t any money.”
Another little girl’s weekly diet (two holds) in January of the same year was as follows: “Monday morning I ate bread and bacon, midday bean soup, in the evening bread and onions. On Tuesday bread and bacon, midday bread, in the evening noodle soup with sausage. On Wednesday morning bread and bacon, midday baked pumpkin and bread, in the evening bread. On Friday bread soup, midday bread, in the evening bread and onions. Saturday morning bread and bacon, midday bean soup, in the evening bread and pickled cucumbers. On Sunday bread and bacon, midday meat soup, in the evening bread and onions.”

(Less than one hold)
Over a third of the “holdings” of Tard are under one hold. What the weekly diet of these “smallholders” reveals is more than poverty, it is a state verging on perpetual privation. One can hardly understand how it is possible to stay healthy, to endure hard physical labour, such as harvesting, under such conditions. How is it possible that the children of these families are able to run around the schoolyard as friskily as the others? One is almost tempted to doubt the indisputable facts, or to go even further and think that some “primeval force” is in evidence here, an unaccountable hardiness for which no sensible explanation exists, which can only be marvelled at. Judging by their outward appearance, the problems are not immediately apparent, the faces of these children are not thinner than those of their companions, but it is they who die of typhoid and other contagious diseases; it is these mothers who give birth to babies for the cemetery of Tard, as the legion of tiny grave-mounds in the corner of the cemetery attest. You can hardly tell by their faces that there is anything amiss, only a few of them, the poorest, are conspicuously pale, they are the ones who go barefoot even at the end of November, their feet numb with cold from wading through the icy mud. Their teacher will tell you that these children are slow-witted, their powers of comprehension incredibly poor, that they are strangely timorous and incapable of paying attention, totally absent-minded and that they spend their lunch hour running about and playing instead of eating. Let what they have written stand here without commentary, let them reveal the hopelessness of their situation, though their misery may be concealed within the whitewashed walls of neat, orderly houses. In Tard, poverty hides itself, it is too apathetic to become embittered. Anyone passing though the village, even if they gain entry into the houses, will see very little of this poverty, this patient suffering is somehow the most intimate secret of their lives. It bespeaks of a direct line of descent from those serfs who were “the patient bearers of every burden” according to Széchenyi, even in his time. “Who is a loyal serf, and how loyal!” even today.
The son of a smallholder (one hold) writes: “On Monday morning I ate jellied knuckles, midday cabbage, in the evening cabbage. Tuesday morning I ate bread, midday bread, in the evening sorrel. Wednesday morning I had bread, midday bread, in the evening noodles. Thursday morning I ate bread, midday bread, in the evening noodle soup. Friday I ate bread midday, and bread in the evening. Saturday morning I ate bread, midday bread, in the evening bread and onions.
I had no milk all month because we haven’t got a cow and milk is dear and
we can’t afford it...” He ate no meat all month, he ate no eggs all month. He ate bread and ate bread again, like the child of the landless peasant who writes:
“On Monday I ate bread and boiled sugar beet, bread midday, in the evening noodle soup. Tuesday morning I ate onions, bread midday, in the evening caraway-seed soup. Wednesday morning a piece of bread and carrot, bread midday, in the evening pea soup and potato noodles. Thursday morning bread, midday bread, in the evening noodle soup. Friday morning bread and carrot, midday bread and two lumps of sugar, in the evening bean soup. Saturday morning I ate bread, I did not bring anything to eat to school, in the evening bread and onions. Sunday morning I ate bread and bacon, midday a bit of milk loaf, in the evening noodle soup.”
But perhaps the saddest of all these documents is what was written by the son of a one-hold smallholder, who instead of listing what he ate on the given days of the week, writes in a strange, childish way, and his boasts and his wording may give a better idea of the situation than all the official figures: “I have eaten many things,” he writes, “but this week I ate mostly bread. I have eaten sausage, bacon, black and white pudding, ham. I have eaten milk loaf and milk, and this week I drank a lot of water. This was my weekly nourishment”.

(On the large estates)
“The food is bad and there is not enough of it,” say the young people engaged in seasonal work. Seasonal jobbing labourers are paid partly in kind, are given about half a kilo of bacon per day, inferior, third-rate bacon of course, half of it is rind topped with an inch-thick crust of salt—bad saltpetre—to make the little weigh more. One of them described how he had tried to scrape off the layer of salt with his jacknife before the weighing, and that he came to grief, was rebuked, and only just escaped a slap in the face. They are given quite a lot of bread, but that too is of “inferior quality”. Five times a week they are given meat soup midday, but there is meat in it only every other day, this is the amount the two-three kilos of meat a month (mostly mutton) portioned out will provide. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, the midday meal is a thick brown soup (made of flour) and potato noodles; these are the only days when two items are provided. On Sunday they are given a clear meat soup (without meat), probably with the consideration in mind that on this day the estate has no need of the labourer’s strength; on Sunday no evening meal is given, the labourer must provide for himself. As seasonal labourers try to save as much as they can to have something to live on during winter, providing for themselves means that the labourer will eat what is left of the bread and bacon. The bill of fare is practically the same on all the estates where people from Tard do their seasonal work. It varies only on one or two estates, where the midday meal is sometimes meat soup—sour potatoes, or sour beans—potato noodles. That the labourers consider this fare considerably better than that of the other estates is extremely revealing. They remember estates where, in addition to the food mentioned above, semolina and cabbage noodles were also served, however, in most places meat soup is the main, the only dish. In some places bean soup or potato soup is served twice a week for variety’s sake, and the allotment of poor quality meat for a labourer comes to an eighth of a kilogramme every other day. It is only by way of an exception that a labourer tells of better quality nourishment; the standard can also often be even lower than that described above.
Their circumstances are almost worse than a slave’s, since a farmer thought at least as much of his slaves as he did of his cattle: it was in his interest to keep them healthy and strong in order that they should work steadily and well. But in the case of seasonal labourers, the employer rarely thinks of their health, the principle obviously being that the labourer will recover the strength lost through hard physical work during the long winter months, at his own cost. If not, there are plenty of others to take his place. If he should fall ill while he is under contract, the employer is obliged to provide for his nourishment and medical treatment for eight days, only. And this is usually the way it happens: if the labourer happens to go down with an illness that lasts longer than eight days, he is given the sack. One of the Tard labourers I spoke to about his condition told me he had lost eight kilogrammes the year before while he was working, another lost ten kilogrammes, a third weighed 62 kilos when he left home and weighed only 45 kilogrammes when he returned two months later. And in the autumn, he lost another six kilos in six weeks, breaking maize and digging up beet. He lives in a shack with mud walls and a dirt floor with four others; he is not coughing yet.
The children’s writings tell of the appalling conditions in which individual families live; the figures culled from the aggregate of their weekly nutrition reveal the perpetual poverty of society. The greatest problems are:
The poverty of the village is so great that the villagers of Tard have practically no money to spend on food; furthermore:
Circumstances force them to sell their more valuable food.
Consequently, their diet is absolutely unvaried, they use only food they have grown themselves, and often only the inferior parts of those products. Bacon from the pigs is portioned out to last out the year, chickens and eggs are sold, only rarely do one or two aged hens end up in the pot. The only food there is more or less enough of all year round is flour.
Which means that:
The food they consume is for the most part based on flour. Dry bread forms a considerable portion of their diet, other main items, though appearing more rarely, are noodle soup or other noodle dishes. They eat mostly white bread instead of the more nutritious brown. Two-thirds of the food items eaten by the majority of the village are made solely of flour, that is bread, noodle soup or other noodle dishes. This means that of every three meals, two consist of bread, noodles or noodle soup. For the most part bread. On average, dry bread makes up 40 per cent of the food consumed in Tard. Naturally, this percentage takes into account only bread consumed as a main dish; bread eaten with meat, bacon etc. is not included in this 40 per cent.
As the produce totals show, the role of food derived from other plants is minimal. Potatoes are used for the most part for making bread, sometimes for soup. Only rarely do beans and peas vary the diet in Tard, cabbage more frequently. In the spring, thanks to sorrel, the consumption of greens and vegetables increases, but it still adds up to less than 15 per cent of food eaten midday and supper, and only three dishes made of vegetables appear on the table: sorrel, boiled beans and cabbage. The village does not eat fruit, except for grapes in the autumn; in this season grapes make up 12 per cent of the main meals in the form of a midday meal of bread and grapes.
The more valuable food derived from the domestic animals is in part sold, in part portioned out for the whole of the year, and thus achieves a much less important role than would be desirable, let alone necessary. In the autumn, when there is money left over from summer earnings, meat makes up 15 per cent of all food consumed, in the spring, when there is less money, only 6 per cent. These figures are averages relating to the whole of the village and show better conditions than if we were to examine the poorer layers separately. In their case, bacon or sausage make up only 3 per cent of the total food consumed, and fresh meat is rarely eaten. These people live almost entirely on bread and soup, in other words on bread and water.
As the rough estimates show, earnings are insufficient, barely providing for clothing, taxes and the repayment of debts. Shop accounts show that the village, when it spends money, does not spend it on food, but on the most necessary household items.
Under present conditions, it would be impossible to improve the diet of the majority of the villagers of Tard. It would help to some extent if the village were to change over from the growing of wheat to the growing of quality foods, but there are enormous obstacles to be surmounted, firstly the force of habit, secondly the absence of skills and know-how change-over would require and, thirdly, that the village would have to look far for a market for such products. In this respect, any kind of reform would necessitate an energetic local leader, thorough training for the villagers of Tard, some way of linking Tard with the market and, above all, a more healthy distribution of land. There are few families in Tard, a relatively small part of the population, where financial difficulties are not the reason for the dreariness and low nutritional value of the food eaten, but a neglect shown in cooking, in other words the women do not take pains to ensure variety and cannot cook well and nutritiously.
In relation to individual meals the figures showed the following:
49.5 per cent of the breakfasts consist of dry bread. Milk consumption is extremely low and there is a marked difference between the milk consumption of the well-to-do and the poor. 10 per cent of the children of smallholders with 5–10 hold drink milk for breakfast, milk only makes up 1.5 per cent of the breakfasts of the children of smallholders with 0–5 holds. Generally, milk consumption diminishes in a direct ratio with that of the number of holds of land, and the consumption of dry bread increases directly proportional with the number of holds. Food left over from the previous night is often eaten for breakfast (this makes up 10 per cent of the breakfasts); coffee is rarely, tea even more rarely drunk. And, of course, it is tea of very inferior quality, usually drunk only when there is someone ill in the home. As one of the children writes: “For breakfast I had aspirin with tea.”
Midday and evening meals consist almost exclusively of one item. 94 per cent of the main meals consist of one item, 6 per cent of two. 45 per cent of the families observed did not eat two items at midday once in the course of a week, and a home where two items were served at a meal more than once a week is a rare exception. 34 per cent of the total of meals is cold, hot meals for the most part consist of soup, in a smaller part of noodle dishes, a smaller part still of vegetables, and an infinitesimal part of fresh meat. The meat eaten by the village for the most part consists of cold smoked meat products such as sausage or ham, and even that is consumed only rarely. Fresh meat makes up no more than 2 per cent of the total of food consumed. In the spring-time the following items featured on the village tables: noodle soup, meat soup, thick brown soup, bean soup, clear soup with boiled potato and noodles, potato soup, sorrel, boiled beans, cabbage, noodle dishes, noodles with poppy seeds. Bacon often appeared, sometimes crackling; eggs, milk, coffee, bread dipped in oil, sprinkled with sugar or spread with dripping not more than once or twice all season.
These lists of meals, beyond being a testimony to the hard life these villagers lead, are not only significant in that they are a revelation of existing, adverse social conditions; poverty shapes society, defines its image and affects the direction of its development. The meals of Tard represent a force that shapes society, one of the most significant forces of all. The lessons and tasks that arise from the situation have not yet been drawn and accepted by politicians or the country, but the lessons have been drawn by the peasantry and their demands and efforts are changing accordingly. The situation betokens an enormous destructive force in the society of Tard. Who, in this country, took this force into account when distributing goods—this force which, under the pressure of present social conditions, may become a force to be reckoned with before long? The social situation places men in jeopardy, but it also places society in jeopardy and today is still an uncontrolled social force. The country or the nation take little note of the dangers that threaten the human resource. It is in mortality figures that they do take note of them.

The spinning room
The acknowledged purpose of the spinning room is to combine the useful with the pleasant, or rather, to provide a useful cover for pleasure. In the village in winter women with young daughters who find pleasure in company set up spinning rooms in four or five places. The girls sit side by side on benches set against the wall, in colourful aprons, their distaffs adorned with ribbons and tassels, beneath brightly painted plates and holy pictures; in the dim light of the paraffin lamp they make a pretty picture. For these occasions they put on their homespun aprons, and sit together in all their finery, wearing several petticoats, their fingers spinning the spindle with brisk, skilful, delicate movements. Generally, they sit along three walls forming a U-shape, with two old women in black forming two dots on the U. These old women use spinning-wheels and listen to the girls’ singing as they spin, smiling inwardly at the unrestrained bantering. From time to time the round faces of the lads appear at the windows, noses squashed flat against the panes, and in a little while they will be knocking at the door and come to sit facing the circle of girls in thick sheepskin coats that they will not take off even in the steamy room. Every now and then the door must be opened to let in some cold air, for the lamp burns with an unsteady, flickering flame in the close, stifling heat, in the still and somehow tantalizing air that is only stirred by the singing of the girls. In the confined space the colour red is predominant, conspicuous against the white, and the room is divided into two sections, so to speak. The gaudy, resplendent, beribboned, flowered part belongs to the girls. This part is closed off by the two old women, behind whom the darker group of the lads throng, huddled together and perspiring, watching for the opportunity presented by one of the girl’s spindles rolling away. If a lad succeeds in snatching up the spindle, a tussle with an all too obvious aim begins, accompanied by squeals and laughter and much straying of hands. While this is going on, the excitement and tension in the air is so great that only the daunting presence of the two old women prevents the rolling away of more spindles and the temptingly exciting tussle from becoming general. At such times a slightly panicky erotic tension spreads in the room, an artificially induced excitement that slowly abates when one of the girls starts a new song. With this the singing girls once more detach themselves from and face the listening lads.The two old women look calmly on, in effect one hardly notices their presence, only their feet move, spinning the wheel and their hands, twisting the fluff into thread.
The centre of social life in Tard is the spinning room; there is no cultural centre where old people, wishing to read, or young people affecting seriousness or wishing to study could gather. The four or five spinning rooms are in a perpetual contest, trying to outdo each other at amusing visitors, who are welcomed upon arrival and thanked by the girls when leaving. In Tard as a rule, everyone is thanked for dropping in, not only strangers, in townee clothes, but villagers also are thanked by their hosts for drinking their wine, eating their food and listening to their songs. Every spinning room has its own special attraction. One is famed for its lively conversation and, informal atmosphere, as the young mistress of the house is a good talker, who sets the tone with barely disguised double-
entendres. Another is noted for having the girls with the finest singing voices, a third for inventing the best games. The lads, unless drawn to one or other of the spinning rooms by someone special, visit all of them in turn; they like to create a scare, tussle with the girls and sometimes follow them out into the yard. Conversation unambiguously centres around one subject, and this also attests to the purpose of the spinning room.
It may largely be attributed to the spinning room that there are so many living folk-songs in Tard, that peasant costume is more often worn than elsewhere, that popular traditions have not wholly been forgotten. It is the spinning room that preserves the village songs, the spinning room that domesticates folk-songs brought in from other villages and it is most often the spinning room that rejects the songs written by known authors in the style of folk-songs smuggled in by seasonal labourers, chiefly about “quiet little bachelor quarters”.

The girls arrive around five or six in the afternoon and go home around ten or eleven at night. What happens in between corresponds to what the lads admit to concerning their love life. In the sultry atmosphere of the spinning room, the most insignificant word has sexual overtones, as usual among adolescents. Most often it is one of the lads, but sometimes the mistress of the house herself, who takes good care to steer the conversation in the sole exciting direction, taking a word with a double meaning as a starting point. Once begun, one word quickly leads to another, conversation is lively and unrestrained, repartee is smart and the laughter of the girls intimates that they have taken nothing amiss and are pleased and grateful for the attention. There are powerful traditions and set ways of wresting innuendoes from or commenting upon the most innocent remark. Two or three girls slip out of the door giggling, two put their arms around each other’s shoulders to make up the horse. The third clambers up on their back and the bizarre little group enters the room to set upon and bump against one of the lads, and the ensuing rough-and-tumble, accompanied by much laughter, ends with their rolling about on top of one another on the floor. The old women calmly continue to spin and smile at the tomfoolery of the young people. The main thing is that in the midst of all the jollity everyone must get their work done.
It is practically inevitable that conversation cannot be pursued except in the tone that has become traditional. A visitor to the spinning room inadvertently gave a sigh during a momentary lull in the singing. The young mistress of the house immediately pounced on him: “Of course the young gent needs a woman!” “Well—to cook for me!” the visitor retorted quickly. Laughter, a short silence, the young woman sweetly offers her services: “I’d cook for you!” “What would you expect as payment?” asks the honoured lad. “Have you got a good sofa?” the woman replies and looks openly at the girls, who burst into uncontrollable laughter, which fills the room for minutes. Another of the lads gives a sigh. “What ails you?” asks the woman. As she receives no reply, she asks again: “Can it be helped in daylight?”
The piquancy of the punch-line is enjoyed irrespective of age, by the old and the very young alike. Many of the girls are no more than thirteen or fourteen, and in one of the spinning rooms the centre of attention is a young lad barely twelve years of age. He sat on a footstool within the circle of girls and kept on snatching the spindles that rolled away from under the noses of the lads standing about in the background, monopolizing the much-desired tussling that accompanies the returning of the spindle. He took part in the bantering as resourcefully and quick-wittedly as the others, took every opportunity to prove he was the life and soul of the party and that he was more grown up than his size would make you think. When he had snatched up the runaway spindle for the fifth time running, someone asked him, dropping a hint that his interference was unnecessary: “Well and where shall I commend you to, lad, to hell, to heaven, or to purgatory?” The mistress of the house: “He doesn’t want to go anyplace except to the girls’ heaven.” And the child, grinning broadly: “That’s right, right under their skirts!” The circle of girls laughs at this for minutes, the more bashful ones covering their faces with their hands and peeping at the lads from between their fingers. The air is hot and stuffy, the girls are pink cheeked and pretty in the reflected light of the red embroidery, in their finery in front of the walls hung with plates. When I say to the lad standing beside me that these girls would make pretty sweethearts for them, he flashed his eyes at me and said: “The girls from Mezoýkövesd are prettier.” And a little later added: “and more skillful too.”
One should not conclude from these facts and their manner that the young people of Tard are immoral. What can be concluded is that their moral standards differ from those of townspeople. It is in this sphere that they take the least note of the commands of their faith. It is certain that there is more sincerity behind the outspokenness of the peasantry than behind the often hypocritical bourgeois sanctimoniousness.
The majority of the innuendoes uttered in the spinning room are unrepeatable. In the spinning room, between narrow houses, after a summer spent working hard, eroticism appears quite differently in the inactive winter than it does in the city. And the tone in which the more embarrassing words are uttered is quite different also. The way they call a spade a spade, the way they banter with each other happens more out of mischievousness than out of immorality. That they must give a name to everything is childlike frankness rather than a protest against conventions which are not in any case their conventions. The unaffectedness and ease with which they talk about anything and everything places the ideas behind the words in a quite different, more moderate light. The commands of nature are taken as binding where they indicate work, and binding also where they indicate pleasure.
Apart from the spinning room, there is hardly any place in the village where the people of Tard gather in larger numbers, few go to the taproom of the
co-operative. In Tard the inn does not play a significant role in the lives of the people as it does in other villages. The wine, one of the most important necessities of social life, the light wine of Tard which can be drunk in large quantities with no danger of losing one’s sobriety, is grown in their own vineyards and is drunk not in the inn, but in their homes. The older and more well-to-do small-holders of Tard, neighbours and relatives often gather in the home of one or the other of the men to talk and drink.The subject of these conversations is mostly politics, the tone sharper or gentler according to temperament, but they also like to tell each other rustic jokes heard here and there. The tone of these conversations resembles those in the spinning room and the women listen to them as unabashed as the young girls listening to the banter in the spinning room. The villagers of Tard are given to making a joke out of everything, they like to poke fun at everything and laugh openly at often-heard jokes and capers. These gatherings are given colour by the beautiful formal greetings, “God keep you”, “God bless you”, “God preserve you” are always ready on the lips of the villagers of Tard. The visitor is often and heartily urged to “partake”, and even the poorer people often and willingly pay and receive visits, giving a warm welcome to everyone who drops in on them. Only the host and his guest may sit at the table, the others are placed all around the room and rarely break in on the conversation between a host and guest.