With my father away in the army, my mother must have had a tough time managing our household. She cooked on an ancient, coal-fired iron range, boiled up the laundry in a copper heated by wood and coal, and wrung out the washing through a mangle before hanging it on a line slung between two old apple trees. She heated her iron on the range, and the only means of keeping the other rooms warm were small open fires. How she did her shopping, I do not know – but as our little Morris Eight was off the road for lack of petrol, I can only assume that she walked the mile to the main road and caught the bus into town, or else that a van from the local grocer made occasional deliveries.
We were seldom short of food, for we had rabbits from the gamekeeper, eggs from our own chickens, vegetables from the garden and any amount of fruit – apples for cooking and eating, currants black and red, blackberries in the autumn and huge white-heart cherries from two splendid trees in the paddock. My mother preserved everything she could lay hands on – eggs in earthenware tubs of slimy waterglass, fruit in Kilner jars with clipped-on lids. In good seasons another venerable tree showered down hundreds of walnuts, and in autumn meadows turned white with mushrooms.
We children had wonderful freedom outdoors. Petrol rationing meant that my sister and I had to make our own way to school, pedalling our bikes along farm lanes or wheeling them through woodland rides to the point on a minor road where a school bus picked us up. Dense laurel thickets and towering beech trees held no terrors, even in the dark of winter afternoons, for the way through the woods was as familiar to us as our garden paths. No sign or building marked our rendezvous on the public highway: the only shelter for our machines was the hollowed-out trunk of a huge beech tree which stood beside the road – and in that fire-blasted cavern we left them, unlocked and unprotected, until the bus brought us back and we recovered them to ride home.
Having been born with a hunter’s instinct, I spent every available minute out of doors. Spring was the time to search for birds’ nests and augment my collection of eggs, which I emptied, in time-honoured fashion, by making a pin-hole at either end and blowing out the contents. I was under strict orders from my parents not to take more than one egg from any nest I found – but the temptation was always strong, and in any case for species deemed harmful, like crows and magpies, the prohibition was waived. Twice I hurt myself quite badly and was carried home with my head covered in blood after falling from a height in attempts to reach the stinking, domed structures built by magpies in the tree-tops. I shall never forget landing face-first in a patch of brambles and ripping my hands to shreds as I crawled desperately through the thorns in an attempt to get breath into my lungs.
Accidents notwithstanding, the nesting season was always a time of miracles. How did a pair of long-tailed tits manage to rear a dozen or fifteen babies inside their tiny, vertical oblong of wool and moss and grass? How did wood pigeons stop their bright-white eggs rolling off their platforms of dry sticks, from which they were constantly departing with a great clatter? How did green woodpeckers interpret the messages they sent each other in the bursts of gunfire – brrrrrp, brrrrrp – which they generated when hammering out nest-holes in the trunks of trees?
Wandering about the woods, I often made for a clearing in which a gnarled and grizzled ancient, with a filthy pork-pie hat crammed down on his head, sat upright on a section of tree trunk, cutting tent pegs from hazel branches. One, two, three jabs against a long blade fixed upright in front of him – and almost before the chips had landed on the ground another peg went onto the pile. He hardly ever spoke; but as he did not seem to resent my presence, I used to stand and watch him, fascinated by the precision and economy of his movements. I see him now, chipping away in a sea of bluebells every spring.
Other choice destinations were the dew ponds scattered about the woods – small, circular pools ten or fifteen yards across, all perfectly round and enclosed by trees or bushes. It was clear from their shape that they had been dug by humans, but there was something mysterious about the way they always contained water. In that high chalk country there were no springs or streams to replenish them, yet they never dried out. Was it rain that filled them, or, as their name suggested, condensing dew? One pool was so thickly covered with algae that we called it the Green Slime – and it was there that I witnessed the magical sight of a woodcock carrying chicks, one at a time, between its thighs. The bird flew low and heavily for about fifty yards, before depositing its freight at a point which it obviously thought safe.
On the farm most of the power came from heavy horses, which did the ploughing and drilling, and hauled the wooden-wheeled harvest wagons into the rickyard behind the barns. They were driven and looked after by old Dave Collis, a small, bent man with one rheumy eye, who was reputed to be deaf only when he wanted to be. The farm also boasted one veteran blue tractor – a sign of things to come; but, like the horses, life moved at a leisurely pace.
The two great events of the year were harvest and threshing. As the corn ripened in July, everybody available joined forces to bring in the barley, wheat and oats: children, office workers, shop girls, boys from school camps organized by the Government – all came out to help. Our harvesting machine was a binder, drawn by two horses – a weird looking contraption with spinning wheels and unguarded drive belts, topped by a skeletal rotating flail which swept the crop backwards onto a reciprocating knife. Round and round the field it crawled, cutting the stalks, ingesting them and binding them into bundles with heavy twine, the knife chattering and the release mechanism giving a loud clack every time it ejected a sheaf.
Great was the excitement as the area of standing corn gradually diminished and rabbits trapped in it began to panic, weaving tell-tale trails of ripples through the ears as they dashed back and forth in search of a safe exit. Boys with sticks and, further out, old farmhands with guns, surrounded the shrinking patch, eager for the quarry to break cover. With the light failing and their shelter almost gone, the rabbits had no option but to run for it – and suddenly all was action: the men firing, the boys yelling, lashing out with our sticks and diving onto individual sheaves as we tried to pin down fugitives which had taken temporary cover. Nobody was squeamish in those days: we knew how to kill a rabbit by chopping it on the back of its neck with the edge of a hand, and how to paunch it by slitting open the skin over its stomach and scooping out the warm entrails with our fingers.
Cutting the corn was only the start of the laborious harvesting operation. The sheaves had to be picked up by hand and stood in pairs to make stooks – three pairs for a wheat or oat stook, four for barley, with a neat tunnel along the middle so that air would flow through and dry the grain in the ears. Boys could make good pocket money from stooking – and we earned it, for wheat sheaves were heavy, and the prickly hairs on barley stalks lacerated the inside of our wrists and forearms, as did the spines of thistles.
Threshing, which took place in winter, was heralded by the arrival of a majestic steam engine, which gave a couple of saucy hoots as it crawled down the last stretch of the lane, crunching gravel under its steel wheels and towing the great drum or barn worker – the threshing machine itself. In the rickyard the two had to be precisely aligned, so that a long canvas belt could transmit power from the flywheel of the traction engine to the drive wheel on the drum. When all was set, work began.
A man, woman or boy on top of the rick pitched sheaves down, one at a time, to a man on the drum, who cut the strings and dropped the loose stalks into the maw of the greasy monster. Standing aloft on the rick, lifting the sheaves with a pitchfork, was exciting work, for every movement might lay bare a nest of mice or rats, which would erupt and make a dash for the edge, launching themselves into space – only to meet their doom among the dogs and boys below. Experienced workers tied twine round the bottoms of their trouser legs to deny mice access, but often a yell or a shriek meant that their defences had been penetrated.
As the sheaves were beaten out in the drum, the air filled with dust, sending hay-fever sufferers into paroxysms of sneezing. Wheat was bad enough, but barley was worse, as the spiky ears set floating in the air left faces red and raw. From