Chapter 13
No use crying over spilt milk

I did not start growing in earnest until I was nearly sixteen. Until that time I resembled Mahatma Gandhi in my lack of physique. Of that I can vouch, because I have a photograph of myself on holiday with my sister in North Devon and I have memories of the brass Mahatma which my gran and later my aunt had in her possession.

Being poorly developed I was also not very strong. It was thus a major task for me to hold the ten gallon churns into which we filtered the milk steady as we drove them the two hundred yards or so from the dairy to the milk stand from which the lorry would collect them. The trailer had no sides or front and there were holes in the floor. These holes were caused as much by the liquor that exuded from farmyard manure as the physical damage caused by heavy weights dropping on them. The trailer had been converted to be drawn by a tractor instead of a cart horse and therefore sloped decidedly to the front that was a foot or more lower than the back. This slope was exaggerated by the lie of the land - a twenty per cent hill down which we had to drive. When I realised that the churns were sliding towards the front I called for the driver to stop. At first he did not hear and continued down the track paved with flints that jarred the trailer so the churns continued their slide. By the time I made my voice heard above the roar of the engine, the grinding of the flints and the clashing of the metal drawbars the churns were dangerously close to the front. For the first time in my life I observed a tractor with brakes that worked and the churns continued the momentum that was denied to the tractor. I could no longer control them and two tipped over, discharging their contents as their lids flew off.

Although he lost most of a day's income that represented the profit from a week or more all that Charles said was 'There's no use crying over spilt milk.' That was the end of the recriminations.

A few years later I drove a tractor and trailer the mile and a half up the track to the farm at Worthing. Charles had dropped me off so that he could indulge himself in his passion and run up the hill. We had transferred our food and extra clothes to the trailer. And he set out. I would check the tractor for fuel, oil and water and then follow. We would then arrive at the same time.

All went well with the journey and we dropped the trailer off, hitched up to the seed drill and spent the morning sowing barley. At lunchtime I returned to the trailer and ate my dinner in its lee. Charles joined me as I was finishing and of his thermos flask and sandwiches there was no sight.

With the experience of hindsight we knew that we should have put them with mine, for mine had not moved from the spot. I walked back down the track to search for Charles' dinner and saw his flask but knew by its rattle as I picked it up that the fragile glass lining had not survived its drop and the coffee would be undrinkable. Still, there were always the sandwiches. I knew from the smiles on the faces of the birds a little way down the lane that I was wrong. They had eaten the lot.