Havering About

I don't think there was ever a time when my mum was 'just' a housewife.
     I remember being told when I started work (45 years ago) that men got higher wages than women doing the same work, because men supported the family. The attitude was that women only worked for 'pin' money, for money for luxuries to supplement the family income and not through necessity.
     And yet I knew that in my family, as in many others, there were times when the only money coming in was whatever my mother earned.
     My dad was a self-employed builder/decorator/plumber/handyman and also suffered several long periods of physical and mental illness as I was growing up.
     Both of my parents did whatever work they could find and living in a Lincolnshire village, the main work available to women was land work. This was usually as part of a 'gang', a group of women who went from farm to farm usually picking vegetables, or whatever was ready for harvesting, and very often potatoe picking. This was 'piece' work, so you were paid by how many sacks of potatoes you filled, so the quicker you could pick, the better.
     But there were some jobs which were solitary, such as collecting eggs from the battery hens, or havering.
     Havering was a job for high Summer, when the corn had turned golden and was almost ready for harvesting.
     When the grain was harvested, the farmer was paid by the quality of the grain, and one of the criteria was how many non-wheat/barley/oat seeds were counted in a sample. So the job of the haverer was to walk through the cornfield with a haver-sack pulling out weeds, by hand, that is: any plant growing in the field which is not wheat etc.
    It is not until you begin walking through a field of wheat that you really find out just how many other grasses and weeds are growing in there.
     This was not a job where you walked up and down the rows, you zig-zagged across the field, sweltering under the hot sun, wearing heavy gloves and thick clothes to fend off the prickly and stinging weeds and also the surprisingly sharp heads of grain. You pulled out the weeds wherever you found them, and stuffed them into your sack.
     So this rural work gives us two words which we use without thinking: the haversack, literally the sack you stuff the haver into and also the phrase 'havering about', which means dithering and acting uncertainly, and comes from the way the haverers would wander seemingly randomly across the fields instead of walking straight across.
      It can also refer to a rambling story which starts off in one place and finishes somewhere completely different.
     Rather like this article.