BEYOND THIS PLACE THERE BE DRAGONS

I always knew dad didn’t really want me to be a farmer. 

Sixty-eight years ago I came into this world, born at home in our little farmhouse on Swineham Moor near the tiny, and extremely rural, village of Knowstone in deepest Devon.  It was a cold, February morning, there was a thick covering of snow on the ground and soon after my arrival mum had a good, but doubtless unwanted, view out the window of dad emptying out the vivid, crimson contents of a white enamel bucket in the adjoining field. Things may have changed nowadays but farmers back then were indelicate sorts. 

They were different times and the people were different too, farming stock.  Locals apparently used to say that there were only ever two types of people found in Knowstone, ‘them that lives ‘ere and them that’s lost’.   Legend has it that an unfamiliar face turned up one Saturday night at the Rackenford Club, a local pub in the nearby village of Rackenford (population 300).  It transpired that this young chap had somehow found his way down there from London (reasons unknown) and it must have been something of an eye-opener for him.  If you are familiar with the initial pub scene in the film American Werewolf in London that will give you a pretty good picture.  Anyway it wasn’t long before one of the locals reputedly waltzed up to him and uttered the immortal words “Ello there.  Aven’t seen you ‘ere befur.  Wot part of Rackenford do you cum vrum?” 

In those olden days it was very much a case of knowing that our neighbouring county of Somerset existed but ‘beyond this place there be dragons’.  Unlike dad mum had had a formal education and she made sure that I for one knew that there was in fact a wider world out there.  Truth be told of course there are dragons everywhere even in those sleepy rural hollows but all the same there is always a certain comfort and warmth in revisiting them in your mind once in a while. Probably not best done in person mind you because it’s never going to be the same and you know that before you go.

Mine was an idyllic childhood by anyone’s reckoning.  As it turned out I didn’t follow in dad’s footsteps even though I was the only son.  Looking back, I don’t think I would have been any good at it anyway and dad’s view that I was not tough enough was, I’m sure, correct. Those early years of roaming* (*in the traditional sense) freedom, however, will always hold some very special memories for me.

Mum and dad were undoubtedly very different people.  Dad was the youngest of nine children and grew up in relative poverty having to fight his corner from the off.  He left school at fourteen and was, to all intents and purposes, uneducated but he was as sharp as a razor and had a brain the size of a planet.  It’s thanks to him that I have an acceptable mastery of mental arithmetic that is virtually unheard of in the modern world.  He taught me many other things of course but that’s a big one. 

Mum was an only child from a much more well-to-do background.  Not exactly landed gentry but close to it.  She had been formally educated at a convent and was set for greater things in the field of law.  At the tender age of sixteen, however, she had fallen for this lowly-born, Erroll Flynn lookalike much to the chagrin of her parents and first my sister Suzanne and then yours truly arrived within the following three years. 

Dad had borrowed heavily to buy those few rough acres out on Swineham moor and life was tough for him and mum both.  Mum had been largely ostracised by her parents for having ruined her life so there was very little support coming from that direction.  Running a farmer’s house in those times with two infants at foot whilst caring for a frail and poorly grandmother who lived with us at the time with very little very hard-earned money coming in could therefore not have been easy for a girl barely out of her teens and coming from such a sheltered background.  Little we knew about it though and to Suzanne and me this was paradise on earth.

If you told me your name at the start of a conversation I would likely have forgotten it by the end of the first sentence.  Not because I’m rude mind you just because that’s the way it is with my brain cells nowadays.  I still have some memories though of those very early years growing up in that most rural of environments. 

We had our own horse, Blossom.  Dad had once walked behind horses in the fields as a boy but those days had now passed and he had little time for them now because, as he said, they just eat grass and provide nothing of any value.  He was a hard bugger my dad; had to be.  To us, however, Blossom was absolute joy.  I would easily capture her in open field - carthorses are suckers for a few lumps of sugar - somehow reach up and put a bridle on her and then lead her into the hay barn where there were a couple or three bales that I could stand on to get me on board.  I remember being told that she was about seventeen hands.  Saddles are for wimps of course, even had dad been able to afford one, and off we’d go.  Carthorses I can tell you can get up quite a head of steam but truth be told it’s quite difficult to fall off a back that’s as wide as a table and where changes in direction are slower even than the Titanic.  That said Suzanne did manage it on one occasion and got herself what I remember being described as a ‘greenstick fracture’.  You learnt about injuries early back then, before health and safety was invented.

We also had a nice bog to play in.  That was great fun even though we were both very much aware of the Lorna Doone story where Jan Ridd’s nemesis Carver Doone met his unpleasant demise in sinking to the bottom of one.  On reflection what were you thinking of mum and dad?  In our front garden was a massive tree with a swing that dad had set up for us and if you couldn’t manage to get yourself up to at least parallel with the ground you might as well hand your head in shame … Suzanne. 

If there was one big disappointment that I remember in those earliest days that I can recall it was my experience with one of mum’s Kay’s catalogues.  That’s how you bought things before Amazon and credit cards were invented.  The back section with all the toys was well thumbed and I had picked out a very racy looking blue tricycle.  Cutting it out with a pair of extremely sharp scissors of the sort that four-year-olds had full access to back then I will never forget the disappointment when the thing showed no interest in being wheeled across the table.  That three-dimensional thing could be learnt about later though I guess.  All was not lost though because my secretly struggling parents had managed to get hold of a real one from somewhere and boy would that thing travel.  I think it must have been mum that got it because she was the spoiler – dad was altogether more ‘frugal’.  Great cornering and manoeuvring between furniture was a piece of piddle … as long as those cats kept out the way of course.  I remember there were also a couple of very old, blue, tin peddle-cars kept out in the yard.  They had both seen better days and the rust had taken strong hold leaving one more functional than the other but they are there to me now as clear as day.

You didn’t start school until you were five back then.  Christ knows how early they start them now but happily that’s not my worry.  I began my schooling in a typical little primary school in the village of Oakford and I was already ahead of the game.  Thanks to mum I had my alphabet down pat and dad had even encouraged me to learn it backwards although I never really saw the point in that.  I think I was pretty much there with my times tables as well – up to the eights anyway.  Do they still teach them these days because it doesn’t look like it to me as I go about my business. 

We used to get picked up from the top of our lane by Mr Spencer in his, enormous to us, blue Ford Consul with a 1962 edition of the AA handbook in the glovebox. There were in fact two schools in Oakford, both houses now of course (like I said never go back in reality) but I only stayed long enough to attend the one for the younger kids up to around seven I think it was.  It was only a couple of years as I say but I still have some fairly vivid memories.  The first day, obviously.  Didn’t like that … at all. We could have done this all in-house I’m sure and it was all going so well back in our lovely kitchen.  I don’t like it.  No you don’t understand, I really don’t like it. 

I am now happily in contact again with Wendy Collins who was the weather infant and reported daily on meteorological matters for everyone’s benefit.  I’ve yet to catch up with another of my contemporaries there, John Middleton, whose career in earth moving was being established even back then but that might hopefully still happen.  Catching up with him that is.  If you’re out there John!  Our teacher was a lady called Miss Bucknell.  Navy blue two-piece in some sort of dense and plainly long-lasting material, always, and very sturdy shoes.  I learnt later that teachers didn’t really have to be qualified back then but all I can say to that is maybe we should try that approach again because whatever it was it seemed to work  

We had what seemed to me at the time to be an enormous playing field and there was one day I well remember when everyone was running around like crazy enjoying a great game of ‘wars’.  I had failed to foresee this and was gun-less so singularly ill-equipped to take part.  Eventually, after much pleading, I managed to scrounge a rather pathetic little Deringer pistol, basically a girlie gun, with a broken grip.  It was, to put it mildly, a disappointing day.  When I told mum all about it, bless her, she made sure that I was fully equipped the following day.  Off I went with twin holsters, a waistcoat with the tassles and a very impressive sheriff’s star.  Mums are very loving of course but have not one clue sadly about either the appropriate allocation of firearms or indeed the way in which things like this are organised.  Needless to say there was to be no game of wars that day.

In addition to her greenstick fracture Suzanne had given mum and dad a couple of other things to worry about in these early days including a bout of osteomyelitis which we speculated was probably caused by drop-kicking the kitchen door and which very nearly killed her.  She also managed to fall out of dad’s old car and go rolling off down Angel Hill in Tiverton.  I was entirely innocent in the matter in case you were wondering and never convicted. 

My last abiding memory of Swineham was the winter of 1963 and all that snow.  It must have been hell for mum and dad for various reasons although being in lockdown for me for a few weeks was no great hardship I can tell you.  I remember when we did eventually get out it was like traversing the Alps on a Ford Dexter.  Happy days indeed.  

Come ‘63 and JFK was shot but "closer to home" mum’s dad was failing in health and so we all picked up sticks and moved to Boehill in Sampford Peverell where dad would take over and run things on those beautiful, red soiled, one hundred and seventy acres.  I was seven at the time.