Ye Tons of Soil

Ye Tons of Soil was a characteristic mispronounciation arising from the Revd Spooner addressing a gathering of farm workers – Sons of Toil

An introductory note.

Dedication.

This contribution to the memory of an era gone for ever is dedicated to my Best Man whose tragic death I mourn to this day. Homosexuals who would have us debase all relationships and friendships by their implications that friends of the same sex must perform gross sexual acts cannot understand the pure friendship which results from shared work and shared relaxation. From the age of thirteen he was the brother with whom I shared my deepest thoughts, emotions and aspirations. Jealous of his personality and success, yet without malice, I still share my thoughts with him today.

In recording these recollections I hope that his children may see a little more clearly the father they hardly knew.

It is strange that I, the weaker of the two, should have survived the longer. I believe that this is due to the fact that I had to rely on one stronger than myself. For it is I who learnt to rely on the God to whom he and others of that group to which we belonged pointed me. In my heart I know that this same God holds Roger Peters safe in his hands.

Requiescat in Pacem.

Chapter 1
Of Icicles and Newspaper

The winter of 1947 lives on in many minds as a time of extreme cold. In later years people would analyse the reasons and make political propaganda of it. In the cosiness of a country unravaged by war they would forget how we had to rebuild after the effects of bombs and lack of resources caused by torpedoes. But to the four year old boy that I was the lasting impression is that the world was white. Later as the snow and ice thawed it became grimy with melt water polluted by smoke from a million coal fires.

It was only two years after the end of the Second World War and provisions were hard to come by. The number of power cuts is a mystery to me, but I remember there were many, and it was only in the miners' strike at the time of the Heath government that I was to realise the magnitude of the hardships we encountered. Many memories have been erased from me by the passage of time. But that only serves to heighten the sense of those I remember.

As well as indoor plumbing, our house had an outside toilet with a wooden door that let in the weather. In that cold winter it was hopeless trying to use it, frozen solid as it was and with icicles taller than I. But throughout the winter the sheets of torn newspaper hung on their string waiting for the first brave foray into its austere comfort. It was not only coal that was in short supply - real toilet paper was reserved for indoors! When boots were dirty with mud or snow we were discouraged from going in and out too often.

Chapter 2
Ghost Ships in the Fog

Our house stood on the corner of two roads. Because the roads in that part of Brighton are so steep and we were on the uphill side of the junction the house was eight to ten feet above the roads. The garden surrounding it was retained by cement-rendered walls. What lay underneath their skin I never knew. At the back of the house between us and our neighbours rose similarly high walls but these were made of flint set in cement with broken bottles embedded in the top to discourage stray cats. I think the cats ignored the perils, while the glass caused problems for anybody who tried to mend the walls.

The entrance to the garden from the minor road was a set of steep steps with sheer walls to either side. This made an ideal chasm about three feet wide over which we could build bridges and many a summer's day saw me cantilevering planks from one 'bank' until they overlapped the far side. Such feats of engineering were unrivalled in all the world.

Passing in front of the house, the road rose steeply and caused not a few problems in winter for vehicles as well as pedestrians. How cautiously we children would walk along the pavements, sometimes stepping into the road to avoid the piles of snow that had half-thawed only to turn to ice which no foot could imprint; but no vagaries of the weather could compare to the mist and fog that swept the town in those years before the Clean Air Act of 1952. Almost at a stroke the Act cleared the London air of the smogs that claimed so many lives and incapacitated even more; and the effect was felt at the fifty or so miles distance from the capital as well. Even the mile or so which separated us from the sea could not completely dim the sound of ships' foghorns as they ploughed the English Channel on their way to and from Shoreham harbour. And up our hill ran the trolley bus route to Hollingbury.

Ah! Those trolley buses - silent as only an electric vehicle could be, and with a low-speed acceleration beyond any diesel or petrol-engined omnibus. So great was their acceleration that they would toss the hapless passenger who had not reached the safety of a seat. Silent indeed, but prone to throw their connecting arms off the overhead wires if the driver failed to negotiate a corner along the correct line, or moved across an intersection too fast. And then he was stuck until the conductor had retrieved the long pole that was always slung under the vehicle for such eventualities, With a flick he would throw the head of the pole into the air so that it cradled the connecting arms and repositioned them against the underside of the wires. With current re supplied the bus would be on its way as soon as the pole was stowed ready for the next mishap. For many years I pondered how the arms were held aloft as they overcame gravity.

But at night in the fog, these machines took on a different aspect. Our front-room windows were level with the upper deck. With nose pressed to the window and the house lights out it was possible to see them pass silently by. But only just, for the swirling fog reduced visibility to ten yards or so, and most of this was occupied by our front garden. Thus on some nights all that could be seen was a faint, ghostly glare of their lights through their windows, or if the connection between bus and wire was poor, the vivid violet arc light as they lost and re-established contact.

Chapter 3
The Barber's Shop

It was considered right, proper and hygienic that men and boys should wear their hair short in those days before beatniks, hippies and dropouts. Hair was cut as frequently as fortnightly and no self-respecting businessman would allow his collar to be partly hidden by even a single wisp.

From the age of three or so we were taken to the nearest barber's shop for our obligatory short back and sides. I suspect that barbers then, like many other tradesmen learnt their craft in the army. And in the army there was only ever one way to do things - the army way. This led to the unimaginative lack of styles alleviated by the exuberance of moustaches and beards and the same approach to cutting using clippers, scissors and razor. Hence the need to move our heads so that the skin - even our young unsagging skin - was drawn tight over the underlying muscles and bones so that there were no folds to snag the clippers or the razor blades.

There were two leather-covered chairs with footstools in front of them. They faced the wash basins which in those days were used not so much for the hair before cutting as mixing the lather for the weekly visit of the blue and black collared workers who still went in on Friday evening or Saturday for their weekly shave, preferring the sharpness of the well-honed cut throat razor to the bluntness of an over-used safety razor at home. Behind the basins were mirrors in which customers could see the effect of the barber's labours. Small boys sat on a plank placed across the arms of the chairs so that they were raised to a convenient height for the barber.

One day I noticed a boy there. I had seen him before; for he lived in the house on the other side of the road - the downhill side of the junction. When his mother suggested to mine that I might like to play with him one day there began a friendship that was only ended when he was sent to the boarding school in the footsteps of his older brothers. I last heard of Andrew Edward Hunter Lee some years later when I revisited his mother and discovered that he was attending Heidleberg University. Since then his parents moved or died and I lost touch completely. His father once told us that friendship drives men to cross the world to see each other. I occasionally try to locate Andrew, but have been unable to so far.

Chapter 4
The Box In The Corner

Unlike my own children I only attended one school from the time I was four until I went to Grammar School at the age of eleven. I unrolled the obligatory school photograph the other month and was instantly transported to a different world. There I was in the class of 1951 with all the other boys clad in shorts (for in those days it was considered common or vulgar to wear 'longs' before we were thirteen or so). The British Empire was built of sterner stuff then.

The school was solid - brick built - a long line of classrooms either side of a central hall that served as a gymnasium. A balcony ran along its length to protect us from the worst of the weather as we made our way from class to gym or dinner hall. The latter was set at right angles to the main line of the school at one end and was the only part that was two floors high. The lower floor contained the boiler room and kitchens I believe.

Behind the buildings was the playing field. Having been built on the outskirts of the town it was possible to have a field whose size must be the envy of many a town and city centre school. Beyond the high chain link fence were the playing fields of the girls' and boys' grammar schools to which we were encouraged to aspire.

In those days it was deemed necessary for young children to have a rest after lunch. The oldest ones would erect the camp beds that were a standard part of the school equipment and stripped to pants and vest the younger ones would have soothing stories read to them by teacher while they took their ease.

I remember my sister coming in to tie my shoe-laces after one such session, but whether this was a regular occurrence I know not; how proud I was that she could.

Mr Slater, the headmaster, was a stern but kindly soul who showed concern for his charges. I was later to encounter others of a similar disposition when our children attended small country schools. He showed remarkable insight into the future, for even in the years before the Coronation he foresaw the use of televisions in schools. Even wirelesses were the exception rather than the rule yet by the aid of such devices we were transported to the heat of Africa or the cold of the Arctic.

It was that man's enthusiasm that I remember in contrast to the discouragement and arrogance of many a secondary school master I met later, people whose vocation I seriously question. There seemed such a contrast between the care and nurture at primary school and the 'character building' at secondary schools modelled on the worst aspects of our public schools.

My introduction to the television came in 1953 on June 2nd. The date is imprinted on the minds of a whole generation as the day Queen Elizabeth II was crowned.

Our groceries were delivered by a shopkeeper from a considerable way across town. I could never understand why because there were several grocers whose premises were closer, the nearest being about one hundred yards down the hill. I assume that it was because my parents and he were friends. Once a week he would drive his Hillman Husky van on the round that passed our house.(How apt the name of that vehicle in that part of town!) Occasionally as a treat I would be allowed to go with him. The thrill was greater if it took place after dark, when we would venture up Ditchling Road and Surrenden Crescent with their overhanging trees that created shadows below the inadequate street lights and made our progress depend on the van's dim but dark-probing headlights.

In those days of rationing it was doubly useful to have such friends, (although I do not suspect ulterior motives in my parents) and the greatest pleasure they could give my brother was a tea with such goodies as were reserved for the favoured few; a tea with so many good things that he felt not a little queasy when he returned home afterwards. Many children owed their Saturday treats to broken biscuits purchased with their own pocket money in those days before the abomination of cling film and cellophane wrapping on all consumables locked them beyond our grasp. So it was with anticipation that we waited for Coronation Day when we would be fetched and delivered to their flat above the shop, there to be indulged with tasty morsels for luncheon and high tea. And it was on that day that we watched television. Not just through the window of a shop, but sitting on comfortable chairs with food and drink available in plenty. When I recently reviewed those events, with Queen Salote of Tonga, larger than life, and what appeared to be half the world paying homage, I felt the same tingle of excitement as originally, yet tinged with sadness for a world that has passed. How strange it is that I should look back with such feelings to those days when this country subjugated many nations to do our will, provide our food and raw materials, and virtually enslaved the ranks of lowest paid menial workers. There is something both noble and base in the same human spirit.

The television was a typical set of the time, a very small screen, smaller than today's portables, in a large wooden cabinet. The picture was remarkably clear, but only in black and white, and only visible in a dimly lit room. It required the expertise of a lighting engineer to create the right atmosphere for viewing; too much light would overwhelm the picture whilst too little would leave us with a headache brought about by squinting at the tiny screen while trying to see our surroundings. On that day, for a few hours we were transported to the very heart of a capital city, and the capital city of the British Commonwealth and Empire, no less. There we saw exotic people from all over the world, wearing their most ornate and costly robes and fineries while the Church of England and the people of England provided the spectacle and pageantry as only we could. And at the heart of all this I saw the uncle of one of my school friends raise the crown high and lower it onto the young Queen's head and crown her. I never met Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher. Such are the twists that occur in life that some twenty years later I was to become herds manager to Bernard, Duke of Norfolk, who played such a prominent part in organising the spectacle; but that was in the future and I doubt if anyone watching those events with me would have believed me if I had foretold it to them.

Chapter 5
A Flash of Gold

We lived about a mile from Hollingbury Camp, a stone-age hill fort, whose long-decayed tree trunk walls had been replaced in part by stout concrete pillars to show twentieth century man how it was done. Now dug into the ramparts were the concrete pill boxes that had so recently held ack-ack or other guns. It was into these that we children would hide to smoke their woodbine stems, only to resurface from below coughing and with eyes streaming from the acrid smoke.

The centre of the ring, like so many along the crest of the South Downs was populated by gorse bushes and trees stunted by the constant south-westerly winds that blow the length of the south coast. Andrew and I would go there to play at soldiers, especially of the Roman era, or I would go with Roger Redman to spot the wide variety of birds; for in those days before the wide-spread use of pesticides and herbicides there were many. It seemed inconceivable then that much harm would come when we took the occasional egg for our collections and we became expert at locating the nests from which parent birds would try to distract us, but in 1954 Her Majesty's Government saw fit to make that activity illegal.

One summer's day we spied a bird, so bright, so yellow, that we had never seen before and we made notes and drawings of its features, determined to identify it when we returned home to our reference books. As we read them we became aware that this was indeed a rare view and more especially this late in the year; it must have been nesting. We returned on two or three successive days to fill our eyes with the glad sight, to hear his flutey call and perhaps to see his nest. We spied his mate near one of the stunted trees in the depth of the gorse thickets, but of the nest we saw nothing. Next day we walked to the Booth Museum of British Birds, located on the Dyke Road where Brighton and Hove meet.

The museum was a legacy of William Booth at the end of the nineteenth century and my recollections are that like other museums in the area it had changed not one jot since its inception. With brown-painted, glass fronted cabinets reaching from floor to ceiling it provided a fascinating, if somewhat dowdy introduction to the wonders of the natural world. And unashamedly in those days before conservation became the vogue it displayed the tools and techniques that had caught its now permanently immobile occupants. Here was the punt complete with nets and duck guns used to ensnare and shoot the aquatic birds that featured in one section. Here the pins and pipes for blowing eggs - removing the living contents so that putrefaction should not set in and their colouration could be preserved.

In the confusion of the museum, tiny, overfilled with cases of stuffed birds and tray-like drawers of eggs we sought an example of the bird we had so recently viewed in flesh and feather. Our primary headmaster had trained us well in the ways of science, for we were to rely on more than just one picture in a book to confirm our suspicions of the creature's identity. Then, tucked away in a corner, was the cabinet we sought with its two occupants, male and female GOLDEN ORIOLES. The confirmation of our impression took our breath away. When we told the curator his delight was obvious. They were two elated young boys who traipsed their return journey across Brighton that afternoon.

Years later the brief sight of a kingfisher, iridescent over a farm stream, provided the same thrill: a single sight that gladdens the heart for years to come.

Chapter 6
Trains

Boys of all ages from the cradle to the grave are fascinated by the sight, sound and smell of steam locomotives. Whether it is the chance to get dirty or the naked power visible in crank and connecting rod, piston and valve gear that attracts could provide the basis for many a year's discussions.

For those of us who lived on the South Coast there was not the diversity of steam power that could be seen in the West and North country or the Midlands. The legacy of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway was the three-rail electric system. But just outside Brighton Station were the marshalling yards with their small steam shunting locomotives - the railway equivalent of John Mansfield's 'Dirty British Coaster with a Salt-caked Smoke Stack'. Or departing from one of the west-bound platforms was the train bound for Horsham that the boys of Steyning Grammar School and Christ's Hospital rode. When in later years we waited for it to depart from Shoreham station it seemed already that the age of steam had passed - an age of grime and exploitation - an anachronism in our bright new world. Now we travel to distant parts to see, hear and smell those workhorses of another age. Then we travelled to Worthing High Schools in clean yet somehow neglected electric trains past the Lancing Carriage Works where long lines of coaches awaited their turn to go through the cleaning sheds.

Departing from the Brighton platforms were trains bound for exotic West Country destinations - Taunton, Penzance and Ilfracombe. These were not driven by the familiar electric motors but the romantic steam locomotives. It is recognised by those in the know that those of the Southern Region were among the finest ever built. They do not have the romance of the Mallard, that record holding A4 Pacific or the might of the Standard 9 class of which Evening Star is the example supreme, being the last steam locomotive built for British railways¹. What they encompassed was experimentation and design. None were more streamlined than the Merchant Navy class. None were more functional and devoid of charm than the utilitarian Q-1 class, yet this stark austerity gave it character.

Two names for ever connected with that period were REL Maunsell and OV Bulleid, in their respective generations the Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Southern Region.

I take my wife to a hydrotherapy pool. The owners have an impressive collection of pictures of the railway of my childhood: pictures painted to provide illustrative plates in those railway books that satisfy the need to collect memorabilia: pictures now adorning the calendars of those whose pinups are the locomotives of the Princess and other classes. If I am to allow myself the luxury and sin of covetousness then it is these artefacts that are my undoing. One picture in particular shows Brighton station from the north, and there is the end of platform 2 from which we delighted to view the giants of steam: to record their number or name: to use precious photographic film to preserve for posterity their final years of glory. Alas none of my photos have survived.

I only rode the Brighton Belle once - that electric Pullman train that is still in 1992 the subject of letters in the Guardian newspaper because of the excellence of its legendary breakfasts. But I often saw her coaches in the marshalling yards outside Brighton when I stood on the bridge at the top of Millers Road. As a child I automatically assumed that the car named Audrey was so called in honour of my mother. Later, as a civil engineer I would be instrumental in rebuilding that first bridge under which you pass as you head for London - but that is another story.

___________

On the west side of the railway there are several roads that are many feet higher than it is. In the garden of one house there was an 'O' gauge model railway set in concrete and with tunnels through which the trains could pass. Although the rails always looked shiny as if recently used, I never did see any trains either in action or at rest nor any people in the garden; it remains one of life's mysteries.

___________

I think it was my tenth birthday when my father asked me what I most wanted as a present. My mind was already made up. I desired a train set.

I had played with the loco that had been his as a child. It was powered by steam, fuelled by methylated spirits, but was becoming an increasing fire hazard because we could no longer obtain wicks, and those we made did not fit properly. This gave it the unfortunate habit of dribbling a trail of burning meths as it ran across the linoleum. Fortunately it did not have the power to run across the carpet, or I fear it would have ignited that if we had not given up the attempt so easily. I already had an 'O' gauge tinplate clockwork set with its unrealistic locomotive and short four wheeled carriages (later I would see pictures of the 19th century predecessors of our trains in books and be surprised at their crudity - these were reasonable representations), but what I now wanted was an electric train set with realistic features in miniature. I did not want a Hornby set like some of my friends. They were again tin-plate with cab details painted in - however finely. The Triang set I wanted was moulded plastic with such minute details in relief and corridor composite coaches in red and cream, one with an integral guard's compartment. The locomotive was a model of the sleek 'Princess Royal' class named 'Princess Elizabeth' - so pertinent at that time as our new Queen prepared for her reign.

My parents agreed that I could invest some of my savings stamps and certificates to make up the difference between what they considered to be a reasonable gift and the ten pounds or so the set cost. (In contrast, my first real car in 1961 cost me £3/10s.) So it was an extremely happy boy who returned with his father from Gamleys toy shop one day clutching a large box containing his heart's desire. Over the next five or six years I would spend my pocket money on further purchases and spend hours assembling kits to extend the line or the range of rolling stock. When my brother was stationed in Germany for his National Service he returned one time with a very solid dye-cast 0-6-0 Western Region Pannier tank. I conducted experiments and found that it could haul a massive 14 lbs without wheel slip.

I gave the set to my nephews some years later, but not before it had given me enormous pleasure. I even took it to the church hall where we held an exhibition of the hobbies indulged by the youth club. A friend and I spent a considerable time planning the layout that combined our two sets.

When we bought the set it came with a box that held two large lantern batteries and had an on/off/forward/reverse switch. This provided the electricity that was transmitted through the rails and picked up via the driving wheels of the locomotive. Unlike some models at that time there were no ugly pick-up studs protruding from the lines of the engine; neither was there a third rail stuck between the others like an underground train. And the plastic support for the rails was moulded realistically to represent the ballast. However, it became clear that batteries would eat all my pocket money and speed controllers were expensive, so another plan was called for. My father and I decided that a project for winter evenings would be to build a transformer and speed control box. For a few pounds we designed and built a box that provided two independently switched circuits for the trains and additional circuits to provide lighting on the stations and buildings that we built from kits or our own imagination. The design was perfect except for one point we overlooked. It was dangerous. The main switch on the device was one of those two pin switched sockets you could attach to the wall but instead of the switch controlling what electricity came out of the socket, we wired it so that it controlled what came in via an extension lead that plugged into a real wall socket. This meant that the pins on the plug at the controller end were exposed and live until they were pushed all the way home. On several occasions I gave myself electric shocks as I connected the device to the wall in the wrong order. That may be one of the influences on my personality to this day!

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.

Chapter 8
The Sea

Although we lived in Brighton, the Queen of Watering Places, the sea did not hold a strong attraction for me. To this day I am not fond of sea or water sports and prefer to bury my head in a book when I take my wife to her hydrotherapy sessions rather than join her in the water. This amazes those who swim with her and I suspect that as they lie there indulging in the warmth of the water and relaxing every bone and muscle in their bodies they think me not a little eccentric. It may be that my parents imparted to me a mistaken idea that it was common to go to the beach although we often went to the chalk rock pools at Black Rock when I was small or it could be that I was put off by the experiences I had with my brother.

Of Shrimps and Weavers

The rock pools held a fascination for me that cannot be explained merely by the presence of strange sea creatures: sea anemones, crabs and shrimps: or the multitude of forms of seaweed. There is something about the smell of them that differs from the smell of the sea and the waves break more powerfully on them than on an open beach. So I enjoyed my excursions with my parents to them. Later I relished being allowed to accompany my elder brother when he went shrimping.

Even later he asked if I would like to go fishing with him at his favourite spot. The banjo groyne was so called because of its shape. At the seaward end its narrow arm expanded into a circular platform that maximised the sense of being surrounded by the sea. This main stage of the groyne had walls that rose several feet above the pavement and these provide shelter from the sea breezes to this day. Beyond the circle the groyne continued into the sea, but at a level below that of the high tide and adventurous souls could climb down onto this platform unguarded by walls or rails so that they could cast their lines further out to sea and continue fishing even at low tide.

The climax of these expeditions came one summer night when I was allowed to accompany him on a late session that entailed catching the last trolley bus home. It was exhilarating to walk the promenade relying more on the moonlight than the decorative lights that were erected every summer. And I remember the thrill of striding to the bus station for the last bus with the tension of 'Will we catch it? Will we miss it?' for we were seldom punctual.

Seldom have the mackerel swum so plentiously as they did that night, their bodies breaking the surface and leaving silver pools of moonlight scattered on the calm sea. This was enjoyment embodied; but this would be forgotten for many years, overshadowed by the terrible tragedy that happened on another day by the sea.

I had cast my hook as strongly as I could, but it only ever travelled a short distance from the groyne at the best of times. This time it virtually slid down the wall of the groyne but I was not to be deterred. I would catch a fish - I was determined to for I had never done so with a hook before. To that day I had only caught fish from pools with a net. The thrill of that first tug on the line heightened my sense of expectancy. Carefully I proceeded as my brother had advised. I struck just hard enough to lock the hook in the fish's mouth without tearing it. Then I proceeded to gently wind in the line, letting the fish tire so that as it left the water it would not leap and twist and set itself free in the process. As I swung it onto terra firma and called my brother he came over and suddenly became very agitated, almost demented, and started shouting at me. 'What had I done wrong?', I thought to myself.

As he calmed, Richard explained that I had caught a poisonous fish, a weaver. His agitation was caused by the prospect of having to remove the hook from its mouth and dispose of it without letting the barbs along its back discharge their venom into either of us. When he had done that we buried it ignominiously as close to the waterline as we dared and as deep in the shingle as possible so that no hapless soul should place their bare foot on it and become its victim in death.

It never seemed sensible to try to catch fish again for fear of repeating the horror of that scene, but some years later I was holidaying in Monmouthshire and successfully caught so many trout that the excitement paled and I lost interest. Only when I had children of my own did I return to the sea shore in search of prey with my son, but luck was against us, or rather in favour of the fishes and we caught nothing.

I am not sure whether I approve of fishing for sport. I have no objection to destroying vermin, but I abhor the socialising of killing animals as it is practised by the hunting fraternity.

Of Sails and Centreboards

When we lived at Brighton my brother built a sea-going canoe in one of the many spare rooms. It had a wooden frame and canvas sides. I cannot remember it ever being launched nor how it was removed from the room, down two flights of stairs and out of the house.

After we moved to Shoreham Richard bought a ten foot sailing dinghy called Bumble. It was kept in Shoreham harbour near the oil storage tanks, on a hard next to a dilapidated Second World War landing craft. In those days before the use of glass fibre and modern resins such vessels were either made of sheet plywood crudely shaped or clinker built. This superior one was of the latter construction and was equipped with two sails and oars for propulsion in a calm or when navigating against the wind in restricted surroundings. Its superiority demanded regular tender loving care and tin upon tin of varnish. If a crew was required my sister or I were invited for a trip. If the vessel needed to be hauled over the strand between harbour and open sea we might both be invited, the more easily to manhandle it especially at the end of a session when we would be fatigued and more than two pairs of hands would make it possible to return the boat to its berth. It is a near miracle how something as heavy as a clinker built boat can float.

There is virtually no keel on a dinghy - I think that is what differentiates them from yachts. In order to counteract the sideways force of the wind they have a centreboard that is a metal plate that can protrude through the floor of the dinghy and stabilise it. The board is held in a box the bottom of which is sealed watertight to the hull and the top of which is higher than the water level outside the boat so that it cannot flow in; the centreboard slides up and down in this. Raised, it allows navigation in shallow water or when using the oars does not provide such a large cross-section for awkward currents to sweep the boat sideways.

The command to lower the centreboard is 'Drop centreboard', and it is the duty of the crew to provide this service. Trained to the peak of efficiency I responded instantly to the command and dropped the centreboard by removing the pin that held it in its raised position and letting it descend under gravity.

The effect of a large slab of metal sliding through a wooden tube and then coming to rest as its upper lip engages with the top of the tube has to be seen to be believed. A half-hundredweight accelerating through a distance of two feet gains a not inconsiderable speed. On the basis of the old song 'When an irresistible force ... meets an immovable object' when that momentum is abruptly halted something is bound to give. In this case it was the box and as it was torn from the hull of the good ship Bumble water began to force its way through the gap between the two structures. The sound of wood tearing and water gushing was drowned by the mutterings of the skipper who belatedly questioned his choice of crew.

Once again the water did its utmost to dissuade me from engaging her as a mistress and I retired from my seafaring ways. The land proved a stronger lure than the water, and even as I write this in our bungalow that is less than twenty feet above sea level I am suspicious that the rain outside could raise the mean sea level to an uncomfortable proximity.

Chapter 9
The Best Man

When I first saw Roger Peters he was walking as far as it is possible at the age of thirteen in a professional stride across the steepness of a field called the North Slope. He was accompanying Charles from west to east and presently they approached me as I stood by the corner of the corrugated iron milking shed.

Roger was about the same height as I, but had more meat on him. Pictures I saw later revealed that he had slimmed down from being quite a chubby child. I recollect that I had a certain disdain for this 'townie' who seemed to be invading my territory. (How early we come to think of the world as ours!) After we had been introduced and worked around the farm the work bonded us together as I have so frequently observe it do with others.

Together we learnt to lift milk churns filled with ten gallons weighing one hundred and forty pounds and sacks of barley and wheat that weighed up to two-and-a-half hundredweight or 125 kilos. We learnt the safe way to do this and the safe way to handle cattle, recognising their moods by the look in their eyes, the angle of their ears or the relative movement of their tails. Together we studied their physiology and diseases. We helped to deliver their calves. We helped the vet to perform operations. We became steeped in the knowledge held in the countryside, hidden from those who would use it as a pleasure ground but scorn the task of caring for the land and its inhabitants. The care of sheep and cattle became as routine to us as others' concern for their pets. But no matter how much we cared we learnt that farm stock are not there to provide company for humans but meat, milk, eggs or wool. Any emotional bond is soon discounted when you are rearing animals for work. We would fuss over Roger's dog and pet him, but not the calves or lambs for whose life we sometimes struggled until we were exhausted.

That is not to say that we did not have favourites, or that we did not pat them. But we might in later years whisper 'mint sauce' in a lamb's ears. As I pursued my career in farming I became very hard and showed no mercy to animals that tried my patience, but Roger always retained that more child-like respect for his charges. I saw them as an entity to exploit, he as creatures with whom we were obliged to work to provide for others.

In those years at the end of the 1950's food had only recently been taken off the rationing that had been introduced in the Second World War and was still in comparatively short supply. We still imported vast quantities of lamb and butter from Australia and New Zealand, cheese from Canada and bacon from Denmark. Gradually we turned farms into productive holdings as new techniques were introduced and food became plentiful and cheap. Many people now forget this as they condemn farmers for the way the countryside has changed. They forget the poor diets that we endured during and after that war; and they forget that the farming community tried to resolve that problem in the only way it knew. We now realise, with the benefits of hindsight, that in some areas we went too far. The warnings of Silent Spring and other books seemed excessive in their pessimism in those days.

We two were drawn into a recognition that our futures were tied to the land and neither of us found peace in our hearts until we finally took up full-time work on the land. Before that day we both tried other jobs. Roger worked in an architect's office while I worked in the Borough Surveyor's Office in Brighton where I faced the dilemma of having to build roads that tore out the heart of my beloved Downs. During this time we both continued to work on the farm part-time.

Our life during this time revolved around the usual pursuits of young men. We attended a church youth club, as much for the chance to meet girls as out of conviction of faith, although we both believed strongly in the version of God to whom we were introduced there. I continue in that faith and now proclaim the Gospel from the pulpit to which I have access as a Reader. It was there that I met most of my girl friends and my wife. At dances Roger was more lithe and graceful than I and he generally outplayed me in sport and games. He sang well and could play musical instruments, notably the trombone and the five-string banjo. When I tried these activities I tripped, went off key or broke the strings. Although I was envious I was not jealous because I was pleased for him in his successes.

From the relative security and comfort of our middle class homes we set off on the difficult path of becoming full-time farm workers. This was more difficult than I had expected. We only got our first jobs because we had already learnt much in our part-time capacities. From this time on our paths would separate, but we met often enough so that we could resume our conversation where we had left off.

Strangely, we swapped roles. While we were part-time I had preferred to work with machinery while Roger preferred the stock. In order to qualify to attend agricultural college we had to gain experience in a wide variety of farm work. Roger gained his on a cereal farm in Hampshire. Later he went to the vast fields of Lincolnshire where he drove the largest combine harvesters of the time. He also worked with sugar beet and peas nearly fulfilling the words of one of our favourite song-writers - Woody Guthry³.

I in the meantime went to a small dairy farm near Gloucester where one of my first jobs after leaving civil engineering was to lay the concrete yard on which new milking sheds would be situated. The farmer didn't like machinery so I did the small amount of field work that was required. My main tasks, though, were those associated with the cows - milking, feeding and mucking out. That farm provided me with a great influence the legacy of which I still enjoy. I shall return to this farm at a later stage in my story.

Roger went to Harper Adams Agricultural College in 1963, but having failed his first year exams did not return after the summer holidays in 1964. I applied in 1964 and was invited to attend an interview for the 1965 year at the end of August. After the interview I was invited to start there in the September of 1964 with less than a month's notice. thus we nearly attended the same college for a year together, but it was not to be. In the year after me another Shoreham lad attended.

The sequence of jobs he had is lost to me now. One day, thanks to the influence of my experiences with the fire brigade (I jest), he joined them on a part time basis and spent the balance of his time farming. He then became a full time fireman. As a result of an injury sustained in the fire brigade he received a pension and was able to spend more time building up his own farm.

While in Oxfordshire he lived on a medium sized mixed farm, and it was while he was there that he became engaged to his first fiancee but that was a short lived romance because she would have him wait to get married until she had qualified as a medical laboratory technician. Strangely enough that is the job my wife had. Later he would marry an East Preston girl. The occasion of their wedding was my first visit to the church in which I now perform the duties of a Reader.

Roger was the man with whom I spent my last hours as a bachelor. It was he who accompanied me into my destiny as the husband of Sue as he performed the duties of Best Man at our wedding in 1965.

Chapter 10
Fire in the fog

Downland mists can be thick and impenetrable, cutting visibility to a few yards, the cause of many an accident on our roads. Doubly treacherous because they lubricate rubber and oil deposited on the road surface during otherwise dry weather. They are never denser than in the Spring when the moisture laden soil is warmed by the sun into giving off its water or in the Autumn when the dew evaporates in the sun which over the months loses its Summer fire. It was on such an Autumn day that I was disc harrowing a field; slowly traversing the field on a tractor towing the metal discs that break down the first rough edges of the ploughed furrows: the first preparation of the seed bed for the winter barley that provides our beer and feeds our pork and beef. Through the morning the mist alternately cleared and thickened. At times from my vantage point on the crest of the Downs I could see the sun sparkling on the sea waves breaking two miles or so to the south. Then I would be shrouded in the mist that allowed me a vision of twenty feet.

It was during one of the periods of restricted visibility when the front wheels of the tractor nearly disappeared and I had to slow down to a sub-snail's pace to avoid tipping myself and the tractor into one of the bomb craters or dew ponds which were scattered about the area that I thought I heard the sound of bells above the roar of the tractor engine. But how could this be? I was over a mile from the nearest road. And then as the mist cleared, I thought I saw a ruddy glow near the flint track that circled the field. Straining my eyes I realised it was not flames but a large red vehicle: a combine harvester perhaps? But I knew that ours was already stored away for the winter, its wheels raised off the ground to give respite to its tyres which through the harvest would carry its tremendous weight as laden with fuel and corn it circled and devoured the ever-shrinking crop. It was unlikely to be any other farmer's equipment for the only land beyond ours was the Iron Age fort that dominated the crest of the hills overlooking Findon. It was a fire engine! It was their bells I had heard. I was not hallucinating! But why here? As I saw them the crew saw me. One of them climbed from the cab and came towards me. 'What', I asked myself 'could the matter be?' A barn ablaze? A straw rick being consumed? One we had so recently struggled to build against the winter when cattle would be held in barn and need fresh bedding every day?'

As he drew near, the man asked if I had seen smoke or flames. I replied in all honesty that for much of the time I had hardly seen my own hand at arm's length. Somebody had reported seeing what looked like a fire up here. From what vantage point he knew not. And to this day I cannot imagine any but the hardiest soul venturing up to the biting chill of the Downs in mist. I can only assume that in one of the breaks in the mist, when visibility lifts and light becomes so intense, somebody saw the sun reflected off my tractor. Quite how a long-unpolished bonnet of some six feet in length could give such an illusion I shall never know.

This was my third encounter with those men who are prepared to help others at crises in their lives.

Chapter 11
Hunt the bullocks

I said in the last tale that I had met the fire brigade two times before.

The first was when I had ventured onto the roof of my parents' bungalow to adjust a television aerial that was no longer lined up with the transmitter from which we received our pictures. Having climbed up the valley I had edged my way along the ridge and dropped down the three or so feet to the chimney. Once there I aligned the aerial while my father reported any improvement or deterioration in the quality of the picture and sound. When he was satisfied I started my descent, but some time had lapsed since first I ascended and the wind, as so often happens near the coast, had risen.

I noticed the tiles rising fractionally as the wind caught their undersides and felt its increasing force on my face. I prepared to wait for a while until it would abate as I surely knew it would. After a few minutes my father, marginally more endowed with patience than I, decided that I was stuck. His remedy for this was to go to a neighbour's house and phone the fire brigade. In the meanwhile another neighbour went to the back door to tell my mother of my predicament, but she interpreted the news as a statement of fact rather than an indication of doom and disaster, and calmly said 'Yes, I know'.

By this time the wind had dropped and I would have come down on my own, but to save my father from the embarrassment of a false alarm I waited for the gallant lads to perform their intrepid rescue.

My second encounter with that rescue service whose passage I salute to this day, along with that of the ambulance service and the lifeboats, was perhaps stranger.

On a summer day in a year before I left school, Roger and I 'farm sat' just as others baby sit while Charles and Pat enjoyed a holiday in the Channel Islands. If my memory serves me right it was the year in which a road roller imported to the Isle of Sark gracefully failed to make the transition from boat to land and sank in the water beside the quay.

We milked the cows and fed the calves. We continued to work the soil. To all intense and purposes we had achieved our ambition, albeit briefly, to manage a farm. But on that Saturday afternoon, as I was mending a puncture in my bicycle, I saw a police car pass our house and continue on its way towards the farmhouse. Knowing that there was nobody there I started to walk the flint track where I met the police returning. Recognising my badge of office - the wellington boots - they stopped the car and asked me where they could find the farmer. My reply that he could not be reached caused them some consternation and they told me that some cattle had escaped from the farm at Worthing. I said that I would meet my colleague and travel there to recover the miscreant beasts. But that proved easier to promise than to execute.

First I has to mend my puncture and secondly we had to cycle the five or six miles to the other farm, neither of us being old enough to drive on the public highway. It was thus nearly an hour later that we arrived at the place where we kept a tractor to drive the mile and more from the outskirts of Worthing to the fields where the cattle were grazing. Well, they weren't of course, but we had not been told where they now were. So we decided to head for there and find out how and where they had escaped and to follow their trail.

In those days many tractors ran on vaporising oil - a sort of paraffin - and only used petrol to start and run the engine up to the temperature at which the oil burnt efficiently. They therefore had a small petrol tank that held less than half a gallon and a large paraffin tank that held twenty or more. It will therefore come as no surprise to you if I tell you that the petrol tank was empty. Between us we had a couple of bob (about tenpence today) with which to buy some petrol from the garage a few hundred yards away. Yes, we had the money - enough for a tankful with petrol at three shillings per gallon - but we had no can and the garage was loath to sell us less than a gallon, although they had no large can either. Eventually we found a two pint oil measure that they agreed to fill when we explained our predicament. This was, then as now, illegal because there was no way of protecting the fuel from a chance naked flame.

By the time we had started the tractor and arrived at the field it was two hours after we had first been told of the great escape and we still had no idea where the cattle were. Anybody will tell you how easy it is to follow the trail of a herd of cows. Don't you believe it. Normally it is but, perverse creatures that they are, at critical times they melt into nothingness. So we decided that the only way we could find out was to go to the police station and ask there.

The desk sergeant was not overly amused that the two scruffy schoolboys who stood before him were the only means of relieving his men from guarding the beasts, and even less so that we had taken so long to report for duty to him. We were dispatched, bikes and all in the back of a police van - a Bedford Dormobile - to where our boys in blue kept the herd from trespassing on the A24 main road from Worthing to London. My main fear was that my front brake cable had rusted through and that I would be 'nicked', but I escaped that. The police were more concerned with getting rid of the bullocks that were about eighteen months old and a match for any human runner. At any time they could escape again.

The geography of the situation is this:

1 On the east of the A24 are the bullocks in a clump of trees in the grounds of a large house or school where the London & Edinburgh Insurance Society now stands;

1 To the north and east of the cattle stands Hillbarn golf course;

1 To the east of the golf course, some three quarters of a mile distant is the field from which the bullocks had escaped.

Our mission was now to return beasts to field and stop their further ventures into freedom. We still did not know how they had escaped. So with police van in attendance we began to drive the cattle to their destination. Roger and I walked and ran around them as we knew their wily ways and could anticipate when the beasts would once more try to make a further bid for freedom. The police walked slowly behind to prevent their return to the road. At times the policemen who were on foot or we would hop onto the rear step of the van to gain a few minutes reprieve from the uphill slog.

When we were about halfway home we saw a fire engine driving slowly across the fairway. When they saw us they came to meet us, eager for a bit of gossip, an explanation for the strange behaviour of the police who drove across the golf course. We in our turn wanted to know where they had been. We learnt that they had attended a small fire that had been lit in one of the copses on the farm. This intrigued us as we knew of nobody with a lawful reason to burn anything there.

With fire engine and police van in attendance we steered the bullocks for their home in none too straight a line, criss-crossing fairway, rough and tees alike (no doubt to the consternation of passing golfers and later the grounds' men). When we turned the cattle into their field it was not by the regular expedient of a gate, but through a large hole in the barbed wire fence. The way that the wires were severed in the same place, each neat cut vertically above the other, led us to believe that vandals had cut the wire; for wire rusts through irregularly. Thus, although heavy beasts can break it with their weight, the strands break in different places along the fence's run. The fire in the wood had no doubt been started by the same vandals who in so doing had unwittingly provided us with more manpower to recover the cattle they had so thoughtlessly let out.

After that I (no doubt unfairly) had less sympathy for those inept golfers whose balls we regularly found inside the fence but who were too scared of the bullocks to venture to recover: those small hard spherical objects on which our stock could so readily choke. We were worn out trying to minimise the damage to their course, even though in dry summers they expected water that would quench the thirst of our cattle and ourselves on top of the hill to be diverted to provide them with verdant greens.

I still have an aversion to golf courses and a mistrust of sportsmen. But for Roger, I teased him that these experiences led to him seeking and gaining employment with the fire brigade some years later.

Chapter 12
Professional Sportsman

It may seem strange to you from what you have already read that I was once a professional sportsman. Perhaps that is a distortion of the truth, poetic licence, but it is true that I was paid to do cross-country running rather than rugby while I was at school.

I never did like team sports, especially those which involved chasing spherical or near-spherical objects up a field, only to have to repeat the exercise in the opposite direction a few moment's later. the object being of course to keep the ball as far up one end of the field for forty-five minutes and then try and keep it at the other extremity for a further three-quarters of an hour. Neither did I gain any pleasure or sense of satisfaction from being placed in the centre of a scrum with the bony knees of another juvenile delinquent bent upon reshaping my nose and face. It was an action described to me by a Wiltshire man as being akin to a lot of chicken scratching for corn, 'backsides in air and heads to ground'. And of all God's creatures, I am convinced that he thought hens to be the lowest form.

So when in the fifth form we could choose to drop rugby and take up cross country running my mind was already made up. It was even more enjoyable because the course ran for some of its length alongside the very farm on which I worked evenings, weekends and any spare time I had.

Realising that I would be within viewing distance of his stock, Charles persuaded me to take a slightly longer route and check them for him. This allowed him on one day a week to save the time and petrol travelling from his home farm in Shoreham to the one in Worthing. For this service he rewarded me. It was not the money but the freedom that I enjoyed.

The possible irony is for some distance we ran along the track that divided farm from golf course. On the one side the desire of my heart and on the other the folly that I decried.

As I was fairly fast, I was able to lead the field to begin with, disappear from view and rejoin them later as a back marker. I was often advised by the masters to start a little slower so that I could conserve my energy for the later part of the course and not end up so near the back. If only they knew!

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.

Chapter 14
First Loves

Roger and I had many acquaintances in Shoreham in the late 1950s and early 60s. How many of them were friends is difficult for me to estimate now, partly because I tend to be remote and make friends slowly. I think it fair to say that the closest mutual friends were those who we met in the church youth club. To say that it acted as a marriage brokerage in those days when one was warned by parents of the danger of too close an encounter with a member of the opposite gender is hardly an exaggeration. (Remember that we are told that sex was not discovered until the mid sixties.)

It was there that we met Sue Webb whose uncle lived in the same road as Roger and who had a car that he would sell to the right person for a mere three pounds ten shillings. In his eyes Roger was such a one. And it was thus that he bought his first car, a nineteen-thirty-two two seater open top Morris Minor. To those of today's youth that sounds a bargain. Despite the fact that money has lost its value and that the sum represented a good few weeks' earnings at weekends we also deemed it to be so, especially as the package included a spare engine, rear axle and steering column plus both winter and summer windscreens.

It was in that year that the government dealt a terrible blow to us for they introduced the MOT - the Ministry of Transport Test for all cars over ten years old. Essential safety equipment was tested - brakes, steering and lighting. I don't remember a rusty chassis being on the list but think it was. It was therefore necessary to find an extra fifteen shillings to pay for this. In addition the road tax was ten pounds, soon to rise to twelve pounds and ten shillings - just over the national average weekly wage. Insurance was a further ten pounds for young people were then as now considered to be a high risk.

The MOT had become necessary because we were beginning to see more modern cars and their higher performance. This mix of old and new presented a new risk for the older cars could not stop as quickly as the newer and the modern tail end shunt became a serious menace. Up till then few cars stopped efficiently and everybody allowed sufficient room to be warned of the actions of the car in front. In fairness, many of the cars then on the roads were extremely old and neglected. The second World War had ensured that factory output had fallen and post-war economic strategy dictated that nearly all output was exported. Therefore home consumption was seriously restricted.

We had to drive the car to a garage for its MOT along flint farm tracks and then illegally along a hundred yards of the A27 - we were had not applied to hold driving licences for which we were just old enough, neither was the car taxed or insured. Remarkably it passed. After six months or so Roger was lured by motor bikes and I bought the Morris from him for five pounds. This would have given him a profit of fifteen shillings if he had not already paid for four month's road tax of which I inherited one month.

Scrap yards had seldom been busier as the last rusting hulks of old cars were laid to rest while their over-designed, under-stressed mechanical parts could continue to give service provided they received the frequent application and replacement of lubricants that manufacturers demanded. As I hunted for spares to upgrade the Morris I saw some cars that are no longer mentioned in books: the Hillman Aero, Jowett Javelin and others piled one on top of each other, waiting to be cannibalised or sent to the harbour on the first leg of their journey to the smelting plants and factories where they would be resurrected as new Minis or Zephyrs. I say upgrade the car. The main purpose of this was to replace the six-volt electrical system so that it had more reserves; to put two fully dipping head lamps on so that I could see more than the pinpoint of light on the kerb; and to replace the vacuum windscreen wipers that performed slower the faster you drove with electric wipers. I would have liked to add a heater, but only the more upmarket new cars had them then.

Remarkably I drove the car for a year, covering 12000 miles at over thirty miles per gallon of petrol and 1000 miles per pint of oil. At one time I experimented with removing one of the plywood panels on the engine bulkhead to let heat from the engine into the driving compartment. I did not succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning. In order to learn about control we would drive along the Upper Shoreham Road by Southlands Hospital in the middle of freezing winter nights, braking hard and spinning on the ice through spectacular angles on our highly illicit improvised skid pan. We once drove to the beach with seven of us in a car designed for two with an external width just over four feet.

I took my driving test in the Morris. A colleague from work accompanied me to the test centre. When he saw the examiner on whose judgement my future driving depended he confided that it was the same one who had failed him twice and several people he knew. When I saw the man I wondered how I would be able to drive, for to say he had ample proportions would be an understatement. I worried that the clutch would not take the strain of accelerating his mass from rest; for the evening before my brother had taken me for a final practice and had made me reverse up and round the steepest, sharpest corner that his knowledge of Brighton and Hove could find. As he was a civil engineer in the Borough Surveyor's Department you may deduce that its severity was one of the finest tests of clutch, brake and steering co-ordination imaginable. We never completed the manoeuvre for the clutch decided that it had met its match and started to slip and burn - oh how pungently burning cork smells. We limped home and I poured petrol into the clutch housing to remove any oil that may have contributed to the problem. The treatment was obviously efficacious, for not only did the car move the quivering mass of driving examiner, but it never slipped again.

Omens are strange things. As we walked from the driving test centre to begin the test the examiner asked me to read the number plate of a car that he picked from those parked near. Without hesitation I recited 'WP1747 - now pick another - that's mine'. My honesty, I believe, disarmed him. So did my question as we approached the car to begin the test. 'Do you want the hood up or down?' In answer he asked that it should be down, which was a relief on two counts; firstly it gave an overflow area for his bulk and secondly I could then see all four corners without craning my neck. He advised me that he had once had an open-top. It is as well that the rain that had preceded the test now held off until we had completed it or I would have needed to oust him from his seat in order to raise the roof. This could have left him standing on the pavement getting wet and I fear that would have lead to my failing.

I finally sold the car after I had removed the driver's door because the mounting screws for the hinges had pulled out of the wooden ash frame. This had until my positive action led me to lift the door and pull it closed after boarding the car and occasionally banging hard on the outer skin with my fist while driving along because as the chassis twisted the screws would work their way out. Without this running maintenance the door would fall off every twenty miles or so. The trafficators - those precursors of the flashing turn indicators could not overcome the wind resistance they met at speeds over 10 mph without a hefty clout on the panel to which they were affixed. Then they would rise from their housing and on a good day make the correct electrical contact to light the bulb. Once, while driving at the maximum possible speed of 50 mph I had needed to apply the brakes as the road narrowed from dual carriageway to two way with two lanes. As I applied the brakes I heard, one after another, the cables snap. The final problem that laid her off the road was caused by the fabric universal joint tearing so that power could not be transmitted to the wheels. A temporary solution got me home - I slid three bolts though the facing surfaces of prop shaft and final drive unit and loosely bolted the components together with enough slack to allow relative movement.

For farm hands of the old days there is no motive power like the horse. Loved for its beauty and strength or hated for its continual demands seven days a week it symbolises an era that is gone. I have never liked horses, imagining them to be spiteful creatures despite the well-meant writings of their champions. I am sure that, like all animals, the larger the breed, the more powerful the build, the more gentle the manners; but I have encountered no such, only the spiteful ponies and mares owned by town people. For me a tractor fulfils the role of the horse and there is one tractor that above all others recalls days of youth.

There was the brute force of the single cylinder Field Marshall - built in Gaisborough - a single cylinder, two stroke diesel that only ever managed to run at seven hundred revolutions per minute or so. With a specially high road gear it would travel at nine miles per hour, but the normal maximum was six. The piston was nine inches in bore and the stroke was eighteen inches. It moved in a fore and aft position. In fact the whole machine resembled a shortened, squat steam traction engine. The gear lever was of a bolt action and solid as could be. Its exhaust pipe was about four feet high and six to nine inches in diameter, waisted and bosomed like the film stars with their corseted figures that we adolescent boys drooled over.

On the offside was a flywheel the size of a millstone. It weighed nearly as much as the mini car that was to become so popular. On the other side, bolted to the other end of the crankshaft was the clutch housing that held a conical clutch some eighteen inches in diameter. As this took up the strain and connected engine to gear train it would let out a banshee wail that rent the air asunder. Such was the force of the power stroke that as the piston changed its travel from forward to backward stroke and vice versa the whole two tons of metal would take on a life of its own and when stationary with the brake applied would rock to and fro like some mighty cart horse straining at the harness.

To start this mighty monster you used the following technique:

Move a valve-lifting decompressor up to the rim of the flywheel and across its width where it would nestle in a spiral groove cut so that as the wheel rotated the lever would screw itself closer to the edge and on the third rotation fall overboard. This jerked the exhaust valve into action so that full compression would heat the air to ignite the fuel. However when the engine was cold extra heat was needed. This was supplied by a piece of cardboard that had been soaked in saltpetre so that it glowed fiercely. the cardboard was rolled into a tube the diameter of a cigarette and slid into a holder that was then screwed into the cylinder head.

There were two ways to impart the necessary momentum to the mass of metal that made up piston, crank, flywheel and clutch. The technical method used a blank twelve bore shotgun cartridge that was screwed into a housing that had a firing pin projecting through it. the judicial application of a two pound ball pein or similar hammer had the desired effect of triggering the cartridge. the ensuing explosion and expansion of the air trapped between this and the top of the piston forced the latter down with such force that it gained enough momentum to continue its travel through the two and more rotations of the crank necessary to dislodge the decompressor and allow the engine to power up.

The less scientific, and economically preferred technique required human power to be applied. A two and a half foot long bar of solid steel one inch thick was fashioned in the shape of a crank. Lugs an one end engaged with the centre of the flywheel. applying maximum pressure to the other end enabled an average person to swing this latter round with sufficient acceleration so that as the third stroke was approached there was enough energy in the machine for it to continue and start.

On a new tractor this starting handle was fitted with a sleeve that allowed it to rotate without the hands doing so. But with age this was usually absent and hence we needed to wrap our hands in cloth to avoid friction burns to the palms.

The other danger was that, if the handle was not greased where it engaged with the dog on the flywheel, it would not free itself and would continue to rotate with the flywheel, gaining speed. I once saw this happen and the hapless operator ran rather than risk his life trying to stop the engine. Centrifugal force eventually won the day as it threw the half-hundredweight handle some forty feet over a cow stall.

From time to time the carbon that built up in the capacious exhaust would have to be removed. The easiest way to do this was to wait until it had built up and the heat of exhaust gas ignited it. Then it was simply a matter of closing down the throttle and letting the exhaust fan the flames until all trace was burnt away.

I have seen pictures of fires being lit under the engines of similarly designed tractors to assist in the process of ensuring sufficient heat to ignite the fuel and star the engine. Needless to say, once started, we were loath to stop the vehicle so it ticked over while we ate our sandwiches on the crest of the Downs.

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I have dwelled at length on the foibles of the Field Marshall tractor with its unsurpassed forty horsepower engine that pulled as well as any modern monster, while only sipping fuel like a lady at a vicarage tea party; but that is not the tractor that fires my nostalgia.

Nor is it the David Brown Cropmaster, symbol of an empire now faded, pictured so often in far-away Africa or on the runways of Second World War airfields towing trailer loads of bombs, the product of the mind that gave James Bond his Aston Martin.

Nor yet the Turner Diesel, built by a firm of marine engineers in the West country; so finely designed with multiple small nuts, bolts' studs and screws that it vibrated itself to pieces as they unscrewed in harmony and sympathy. Few of these exquisitely engineered Rembrants of the tractor world were built. To start them you pump ether directly into the cylinders from an elegantly proportioned hand pump before applying the self starter button.

_____________________

No, the tractor that I see still as if before me is elegant as a thoroughbred; long, sleek and sinewy. Two versions of the Farmall did I encounter - the model 'H' and 'M'. The smaller 'H' has a twenty-five horsepower vapourising oil engine while its larger stablemate the 'M' has an engine of some forty-three horsepower. Some of these were made when the firm was still McCormick-Deering but the majority were, I think of the later McCormick International breed.

It is the McCormick International Farmall M that holds my heart. Under powered though it is, it is as elegant a steed as I could ever ride. With her thirty-six inch diameter rear wheels that stood over five feet high when shod with rubber tyres, and her small, slim fourteen inch diameter front wheels that contrasted and contributed to her proportions she was a dream to view. Long and sleek she rode the hills in majesty and sureness. The origin of the tractor in Chicago, Illinois made her as American as apple pie.

I confess that I am not enamoured of Americana in general, finding much of it brash, but here was a lady who is as at home on the prairies as in East Anglia, the cotton fields as the Downs of Sussex.

To cater for these variations in function her wheels could be adjusted in infinite steps from under four feet to over ten feet apart. Some versions had the two close rowcrop wheels at the front. Spread wide, the wheels gave a security when traversing the steepest of Downland slopes.

When I first encountered the lady, the driving seat mounted on a massive sprung beam was above my head. When I rode her, my head was above the clouds, my mind in the vastness of the prairies described by that now unfashionable epitome of agricultural writers, AG Street; my every being straining to grow corn to feed an England recovering from the hardships of war and Atlantic blockades. Sun and rain, wind and hail all made their impression on me for there was no cab to cocoon me and keep me from the forces of nature that have shaped our very humanity.

Here, if anywhere beyond the cloistered comfort of Holy Communion was my spirituality. In the open air, striving with nature, using the best that engineers could produce from half a world away, giving life to the people with whom I could have no other, no higher, relationship than to fill their bellies. What a fitting power unit for my last journey from this world; if only ...

Chapter 15
Dorking - the great escape

To have chased cattle from the A24 and return them to their field is a task that should only rightfully occur once in any person's lifetime. that a second occurrence should take place some forty miles from the original is unfortunate to say the least.

As the nineteen-sixties turned into the nineteen-seventies Sue and I lived on a farm at South Holmwood, some three miles south of Dorking. The farm was a mile or so down a country lane that terminated in a road junction with a pond on the corner. It is at this pond that families gather to feed the geese and while away the hot summer afternoons.

One lunchtime the cows broke out of the yard in which they spent the winter and in which they waited to be milked. Their first excursion was round the manager's house where they succeeded in rutting the whole of his lawn. From there they moved towards the road. The first indication that I received of their escape was when my relief milker and neighbour saw them trotting past his window and phoned me. By the time I had pulled on my wellington boots half the herd had passed and was turning up the road to the A24. I managed to hold the tail of the stampede until two workers came and started to return the cows to their yard. I was then free to pursue the head of the herd. Slowly I overhauled them as we climbed the hill to the main road, yet I became aware that at that pace I would not get past the leaders before we reached it. Even if I could, they would be able to disperse over the unfenced cricket field and be more unmanageable than while confined to left and right by the road boundary hedges and fences.

One final effort might enable me to overtake them, but my legs were almost spent. I visualised the chaos that would ensue if they reached the A24 on a stretch where vehicles sped along the dual carriageway. Visions of carnage and twisted metal sped through my mind as I ran the race of a lifetime. Yet I was making no headway, and in fact was beginning to lag. And then I saw a sight for sore eyes; someone was cycling down the hill towards us. For a second I stopped, breathed deeply and called to him to get off his bike and shout and flap his arms. that would surely spook the cows, stop them in their tracks and reverse their direction of travel. it was a simple plan and thence would surely succeed. There was one flaw in it. He was petrified. He didn't get off his bike. He didn't shout. He didn't wave his arms. All he did was cycle into the ditch. Silently. Well, - silently at first. Then he shrieked as the bike stopped more suddenly than he did.

I am not sure whether it was this final shriek or more likely to my mind the sight of a person cycling straight off the road and into the ditch that stopped the cows, but stop they did. They are always inquisitive of the ridiculous. And in the few seconds that they hesitated I was able, spent as I was, to place myself between them and the main road. Soon afterwards help arrived.

My meal was cold but welcome when I arrived home.

Chapter 16
Warwickshire - the foul escape

Cows, as you may have realised from my previous comments, are contrary creatures. This is illustrated especially by the times they choose to escape and go on the rampage. They delight to do so when their human keepers are away for the day, at meal times or in the middle of the night.

This latter predilection enabled me to develop and exercise my night sight. In fact I preferred to walk round last thing at night without using the torch that I had adapted to give a quarter mile beam. Somehow the isolation of the Downs seemed less without a beam of light stabbing the cosiness of the dark. On very dark nights it was useful, letting me see both stock and fences from a distance, but when close to them I preferred to use the available natural light. Once somebody had turned on an electric light in a house or farm building it dazzled me to the extent that I could not see the stock properly. I often turned off the lights in the cow yard as I left work, only to find that someone had turned them on after I had left. People were concerned that the cattle would bruise themselves as they stumbled about and bumped into things, But my observations are that they can sense objects as slim as electric fence wire without assistance. It is we humans who have lost our sensitivity in this respect.

That is not to say that I didn't use my torch. It was very useful when I had to administer life-saving calcium or magnesium injections into the cows' veins; it let me check that the needle was seated in the body of the vein rather than its thick walls; it revealed the bubbles rising in the bottle that told me that the dose was flowing along the metre length of tubing that joined bottle to needle.

Sue and I had moved to the farm in Warwickshire in 1971 and it was while we lived there that our daughter attended her first school. She also had her tonsils removed. Our bungalow was about a mile from the farm buildings where I was responsible for building up the herd from ninety to one hundred and eighty cows. The assistant herdsman lived in a similar bungalow situated at the foot of the lane that led from the road to the dairy some hundred yards away. On a dark, cold winter's night he heard shuffling round his garden, and on looking out of his bedroom window he saw the cows had escaped from their kennels and were on the point of spreading both ways along the road. He went out in his night attire and managed to stop them in time. Meanwhile his wife phoned me up for assistance. I dressed quickly and leapt into our car - a Renault 4 that was ideally suited to the country lanes, with its high ground clearance and softish suspension to soak up the bumps. As I reached the foot of the lane I could see Lewis running round the cows and managing to restrict them. I went to him and gave him a respite during which time he was able to go indoors and change into more suitable clothing to protect himself against the chill of the night.

When he returned we were able to return the escapees slowly to their quarters. At first they willingly walked through the twelve-foot wide gate, but once the dominant ones were through, they insisted that the lesser ones should leave them in peace. They therefore turned to block the entry of the others who milled round aimlessly before running between the two humans and retracing their tracks. We in turn ran hither and thither to restrain them.

There was a wonderfully smelly, filthy ditch that guided the slurry from the kennels to the lagoon from where it could be loaded into spreaders and returned to the land from whence the sweet grass grew that fed the cows. Well aware that this was there we carefully ran to its extremities and thence round to the other side, while the cows, for all their apparent awkwardness, were well able to leap its width. When they returned via the same short cut we were able to take advantage of the lie of the land to do the same. For some time we continued this to and froing. With only two cows left outside they proved more demanding than all the others put together. When one leapt over the ditch while the other stood still, I was so relieved that they were tiring that my mind flipped and I tried to walk across as if on water. The slurry engulfed my boots and legs, retarding their progress while the rest of me continued at the same pace. The result of this was that I was stretched out horizontally in the morass. My resolve was firmed by this and the last two miscreants were returned at record speed.

I placed sacks on the car seat and drove home. Once in the safety of the garden I called Sue for a bucket of water and started to strip. Fortunately it was past midnight and true to rural tradition our neighbours were all tucked up in bed fast asleep. I poured several buckets of water over myself before being able to dry myself with a towel and entering the kitchen. I still had to pour a few more gallons of water onto my clothes. Next morning I saw the tide mark where all this water had dispersed the slurry over the path but for now I was able to have a quick bath and thence to bed to sleep the sleep of the over-exhausted.

Next day when I was discussing the events of the previous night with the farm manager he commented that this had happened several times before we had moved to the farm. On stormy nights the force of the wind on the corrugated iron bolted to the gate bowed it. This shortened it and the bolt slipped from its hole. I was very pleased to learn this - explaining in my worst agricultural language what I thought of anybody who accepted the same thing happening more than once. For this and other events I was relieved when he was given notice some time afterwards. Needless to say I immediately bolted a chain round the gate and its shutting post so that the same mishap should not recur.

Chapter 17
Before Central Heating - Sue's Story.⁴

One Saturday evening in January I was fifteen years old and there was a dance in St. Mary's church hall, arranged by the social club. How strange now in my centrally heated home to think back on my preparations for that engagement. To leave the comfort of a blazing coal fire, the little black and white screen, Dixon of Dock Green, the only warm room in the house for an icy bathroom and bedroom. There I would shed woollen jersey and skirt and replace them with my best summer frock with a passing envious thought of the men more warmly clad in dark suits and even a v-necked jersey. Should I walk the two miles into town in my only pair of high-heeled shoes or carry them with me and walk in my school lace-ups. Arriving in company with youth club friends encountered on the way I would mount the stone steps to the tiny lobby and inspect my appearance in front of the chipped and spotted mirror. The hall, musty and decorated in once cream paint was heated by a single solid fuel stove and approximately sixty bodies. With a local band in action playing quicksteps, waltzes and the Gay Gordons, all were perspiring by suppertime. Tiny sandwiches - egg and cress, fish paste and sardine the most usual fare - with sausage rolls and little iced cakes laid out on white tablecloths. There was a choice of orange squash or coffee to go with the food. After the excitement of the last waltz and wondering who would pair off with whom we would troop out into the winter night. It was usual in that age of chivalry for a young man to walk home, not only with his own girl, but to see several of her friends to safety as well. When I arrived home my father was still up and wrapping rags around the bathroom pipes against that sudden drop in temperature that occurs in that bitter hour before dawn when life is at its lowest ebb. I crept into bed my feet reaching out for the hot water bottle my mother had placed there an hour before.