Strawberry Fields

Strawberry Fields (2007), a satirical novel by British author Marina Lewycka, follows the travails of a group of economic migrants—from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia—as they try to make a life in Britain. Lewycka, herself the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants to the UK, is best known for her multi-award-winning debut A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005). Strawberry Fields, her second novel, was first published in the UK and Ireland as Two Caravans.

As the novel begins, nineteen-year-old Irina, a Ukrainian girl, is brought to a “ramshackle strawberry farm” on Sherbury Down in the south of England by her sinister Russian trafficker Volk: “He looked quite a bit like his car: overweight, built like a tank, with a gleaming silver front tooth, a shiny black jacket, and a straggle of hair tied in a ponytail hanging down his back like an exhaust pipe.”

Irina, an academic’s daughter who plans to write the Great Ukrainian Novel, is naively optimistic. She is delighted with her first sight of the English countryside: “The first thing I noticed was the light — the dazzling salty light dancing on the sunny field, the ripening strawberries, the little rounded trailer perched up on the hill.” But Vulk (who has his own plans for Irina) warns her: “England is a change, little flovver. England is not like in you school book.”



On the farm, Irina is introduced to the existing team of migrant workers, including their supervisor, the forty-year-old Ukrainian woman Yola (who fears that Irina’s arrival will disrupt her cozy arrangements). There is also Andriy, a young Ukrainian man who dreams of meeting a sexy “Angliski” woman, his friend Tomasz, an older Ukrainian man with a hopeless crush on Yola, a pious Malawian boy, and two Chinese girls.

The workers live together in two overcrowded caravans—one for men; one for women—on a hillside above the fields. Their communal shower doesn’t work. The toilet is locked at night. They have to pay for their accommodation and provisions.

Lewycka takes us into the point of view of the farm’s owner, Farmer Leaping, to show us how the system works. He and his wife, Wendy, have set up a series of fake companies which deduct the workers’ expenses in food and provisions from their wages: “The beauty of it,” Leaping thinks, “is that half of what you fork out in wages you can claw back in living expenses.” The Leapings congratulate themselves on their financial acuity. They know that their system is even more exploitative than that of neighboring farmers’, but they reassure themselves that their workers have “better” conditions on the Leapings’ farm than they could enjoy in their own countries. Farmer Leaping is also pleased with his side-arrangement with Yola: she sleeps with him in return for certain perks.



Irina finds herself having to dodge the attentions of Volk, whose plan gradually becomes clear: he wants to lure Irina into prostitution. Andriy offers to protect her, but Irina is scornful of her fellow countryman: “I haven’t come all this way to spend my time fending off the advances of a miner from Donbas.”

Tired of trying to persuade Irina, Volk comes to take her by force. Meanwhile, another drama is unfolding on the farm. Wendy Leaping catches her husband and Yola in flagrante. Distraught, she runs over Farmer Leaping with his red sports car. The police are called, and the migrants scatter, commandeering the caravans they live in, a battered Land Rover, and the farm’s dog, Dog.

Andriy and Irina are separated, so Andriy sets off to find her, taking Tomasz with him. Tomasz drops out of the quest to work in a chicken-processing factory (“Buttercup Meadow Farmfresh Poultry”) and Lewycka takes the opportunity to portray the savage conditions under which livestock are killed and packaged. Andriy presses on in search of Irina, dreaming of taking her to live in Sheffield, which he pictures as “a place of palaces and bougainvillea.”



Along the way, the migrants encounter people who either exploit or help them from across the spectrum of British life: yuppies, environmental activists, miners, and “recruitment consultants,” men with “mobilfons” who promise to find the migrants work. The Chinese girls trust one of these men, Vitaly, to take them overseas to a new life: it is clear to the reader that they will be sold into prostitution on arrival.

Irina and Andriy, however, avoid these pitfalls and are reunited. Falling in love, they decide to make a life together in England: “Maybe he and Irina could stay in Sheffield and find jobs for themselves, and maybe he would even go to college and train to be an engineer. He would buy a mobilfon, not for doing business, but to talk to his friends, and at weekends they would come to a bar like this, and drink and laugh.”

However, they know they will never truly belong in English society: their world is too different.