Chapter 7
Up the Downs

Through the winter and spring of 1956 my parents began to take me to new parts of Brighton and the surrounding towns. They wanted to move. After viewing houses in Patcham and Steyning, Hove and Blatchington, they decided on a bungalow at the top of an unadopted flint road on the edge of the Downs at Shoreham. Their choice was to influence my choice of career, my marriage and my relationship with God. Of the latter two I shall say more later, but for now I shall tell you how I came to be a son of the soil.

That summer I was offered a holiday in Holland with one of my father's pen friends. I left Varndean Grammar School before the end of term and my father took me to Dover and put me on the cross-channel ferry. I would be met on the other side by his friend. In those days of innocence one could allow a child the freedom to travel alone in safety.²

As soon as I returned from Holland we moved. My oldest sister had married and moved to Shoreham some years previously and we now lived a few hundred yards from her and her rapidly expanding family. One great love of my brother-in-law was mushrooms. To ensure a regular supply in the autumn he would hop over his garden fence and pick horse mushrooms in the field immediately beyond it. After we had moved he took me with him. One day we met the farmer, who, in retrospect jokingly, suggested that I should do some work for him to pay for the fare. Thus began a relationship that led me to my chosen career. In earlier years I had visited an elderly member of the family who lived in a country cottage nest to a boggy wood somewhere on the Weald and had heard my aunt tell of her brother Eric's love of the land in his youth. My new acquaintance ensured that love of the countryside and the soil that had inherited a place in my blood would not escape.

At the age of thirteen I was a scrawny, weedy rake. My ribs stuck out and you hardly needed an X-ray to view the bones in my arms. I also wheezed if I did too much physical exertion despite the worst endeavours of sports masters. It was not that I didn't like physical exercise, but I have never been a team person and the idea of running after a bit of dead over-stuffed leather seems silly to me although I became happy and adept at chasing live cattle. So, although I was physically unsuited to hard work, the solitude of a day's work in the open air suited my personality. I have never been excessively strong or capable of sustained exertion, but by using a limited brain and suitable machinery I could perform as much work as many a man with more strength. Gradually I filled out and became stronger as, to personalise a song written by one of my forebears:

I Ploughed and sowed and reaped and mowed
and became a farmer's boy.

The farmer was a well-educated man who had followed his father into the engineering department of the Southern region of the now nationalised British Railways. He had served his apprenticeship in the various sections and done his stint in the one that responded to emergencies going out to train crashes to recover mangled trains for analysis of the fault. He had then started keeping a couple of cows on a piece of land alongside the Upper Shoreham Road at its junction with Kingston Lane where Southwick and Shoreham-by-Sea meet. After this he gained the tenancy of thirty acres of Downland, and it was to this that he brought his wife, the daughter of a Horsham farming family. During this time he subsidised his farm by lecturing in thermodynamics at Brighton Technical College.

There is something about his gentle personality that attracts me: a man who wrests his living from hard work yet is not hardened by it. Perhaps his English eccentricity, forged in the best grammar school tradition and nurtured by listening to that most gentle of humour expounded in the radio programme 'My Word', is one in which I find a kindred spirit. I hear his words spoken nearly forty years ago as if it were yesterday. I learnt more from him than all the schoolmasters I ever met: if not in quantity, at least in their relevance to life.

To Charles Granshaw I owe a debt that cannot be repaid.

I thus began seven years of part-time farming before I finally became a full-time agricultural worker. And about a year later I saw another young person, the son of the teacher of this man's children, walk across a field with him. It was this boy who was to become my closest friend and the Best Man at our wedding. For his gentleness and common sense he deserves an entire book to be written.