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APPENDIX to Autobiography of Mary Buckler

1912-45, as seen by Bryan Heath*

*Extract from the autobiography of George Bryan Stephens Heath (Mary Buckler’s youngest son)

CHAPTER 1IN THE BEGINNING

My first real memory is of my third birthday. I lay on a huge pile of tree branches which would later be sawn up for firewood. Why I chose the woodpile for my couch, I do not know; it must have been about the most uncomfortable place in the neighbourhood, but I had chosen it and I lay there for what, from my memory, seems a long time. I was reading my birthday present, the Chatterbox Annual -- a marvellous treasure house of stories, information and pictures. Do not assume from this that I was a budding genius who could read at the age of three; far from it. I was reading the pictures, a practice to which I was addicted at that time.

That Chatterbox played a big part in my present-receiving life during the next few years. My first memory of it must have been in 1915 and, by the time Christmas arrived, it had been taken off me because of some naughtiness which was judged to be heinous. This meant that it again became available to be given to me as a present, and this happened regularly for a few years. Oddly, I always accepted it with deep and sincere gratitude. I looked on it as an old friend and became closely attached to it.

I cannot remember the crimes which got me deprived of my Chatterbox but it is easy to speculate about this because I had a perversion which, for all I know, may be common in children and was an obsession with me: wallpaper was to me what manna probably was to the Israelites in the wilderness. I found that if, with my tiny fingers, I picked away for long enough at the wallpaper where it arose from the skirting board, it would eventually begin to come away; sometimes, hours of single-minded effort would be needed, but it was always worth it because it opened the way to a skilful and thrilling (no other word would adequately describe it) operation: by pulling ever so gently at about right angles to the wall, and standing on chairs when it became necessary, I could sometimes remove a strip of paper all the way up to the ceiling. I confessed it to nobody but the greatest ambition of my life was to remove a strip so narrow that Mother would not be able to see it. Alas, I never did manage this and the punishments which followed discovery were dreadful. Always, though, when the temptation had again built up sufficiently, I transgressed again. To someone as poor as Mother was then, this vandalism must have been the last straw.

A present we could depend upon getting each Christmas was Doidges Annual. This, I am almost certain, was published in Cornwall and given to all of us, presumably by one of Father's friends. I would love to see one of these annuals now. From what has happened to most other treasures of my youth (Laurel & Hardy and Marx Bros films are examples) I suspect I would now despise Doidges but, in those days, it was wonderful. It was a pleasant mixture of stories, instructive articles and jokes -- many in the form of riddles. And this leads me to the etiquette of telling jokes -- in our family, at least.

When we told a funny story, or asked a riddle, if the recipient said: "I've heard that one" or instantly answered a riddle correctly, he was deemed to have behaved in a boorish and offensive manner. By custom, he was supposed to give up the riddle after a lot of cogitation or laugh heartily when the punch line of a joke appeared. When, sometimes later in the same day, the act was reversed, the former teller was expected to repay his debt. How this system arose, and whether it operated in other big families, I do not know.

At the time of my reading on the woodpile, we must just have come from living with Mother's brother, of which period I have no memory. Curiously though, I had what might be called a memory from before that time; it must have been from when I was

barely 18 months old. When I was adult, I told Mother of a picture which frequently appeared in my mind: a big entrance hall, in which our dower chest and grandfather clock stood; on top of the clock was a cane. Mother was impressed because, she said, it was an exact description of the hall at Westfields and the cane, which figured largely in our family life, was always kept on the clock.

One of my childish beliefs was, according to Mother, common to most of her children when they were small. I was under the impression that my parents were the parents of everybody in the world. This belief was knocked out of me when, at the age of about four, I assured a village kid that his daddy had died.

The war, which lasted three more years after we moved to Shenton, did not affect us much. Mother probably had a hard time getting enough food for us but, if you've got to go through a war, living in a hamlet almost guarantees that starvation will not be a serious problem. My main memory is of the hooter which was blown when zeppelins came over; I thought it indicated the army was going to let them bomb us.

When I was still small, I was indoctrinated with the worst form of patriotism and the way in which I accepted teachings which were plainly absurd still terrifies me. We all, adults as well, believed we were at war only because Germany had forced it on us. All our soldiers were cheery good-natured fellows who were so kind they hated to fight but, 'by jingo, if they did'. The other ranks adored their officers because you see, the officers had been to public schools and had learnt leadership. To those who really believed, as most of us did, that our army's high command was wonderful, any dispassionate history of the great war makes wretched reading.

The picture of Germans was easy for a small boy to grasp: they wore perpetual snarls and bayoneted babies; according to popular belief, they then toasted and ate them. Arrant cowards that they were, they always ran away when they came up against our tommies and this explained why their officers who, you see, were not public school men, always led from behind in an effort to prevent retreat -- or even to be on the safer end of the retreat. When I went out into the world, it was a shock to find we English seem to be no better and no worse than other races.

“My country -- right or wrong'' was a great saying in those days and I often thought of it during the Nuremberg trials.

At school, we were assured that the sun never sets on the British Empire and a well-lit globe, on which our colonies were coloured red, was rotated to reinforce our belief. The Boys' Own Paper confirmed all the nationalistic rubbish we had been taught.

CHAPTER 2THE SOCIAL SCENE AND THE CHURCH

The church, in those days, had such an effect on social life that I have combined the two in this chapter. Nowadays, those who do not attend church services excite little comment; of those who do attend, I suspect a lot go as a means of getting into local society. Villagers in my youth attended because they were afraid not to.

Shenton, although such a small place, provided a good picture of a social order which had not changed much since mediaeval times. Probably, it changed more in the period 1920 to 1950 than it had changed during the previous 300 years.

Mother was right in saying that, when we moved to Shenton we became cottagers. Where she went wrong was in implying that she accepted it; she did not and, despite our abject poverty, a touch of the grande dame was never far from her demeanour when dealing with villagers -- of all classes. We kids, I think, were more conscious of our lowly status but we always secretly thought we were a cut above the rest of the village -- despite all the evidence against this.

Mother must have aimed at still living respectably. For example: we always used dinner napkins (we called them "serviettes") though they were by no means damask; we had regular silver-cleaning sessions; and we had the only knife board I have ever seen. In those days, none of our knives were made of stainless steel and the blades tarnished badly. Our knife board was thick (deep), about 9 inches wide and 2 feet long. The top inch of the thickness was made of strips of leather standing on edge; how the leather was held there, I do not know, but the strips were packed so tightly you could hardly see the joins. We sprinkled a red powder on the leather and then rubbed the knives on it until they shone. It was a tedious, tiring job and Mother was generally pretty critical of the results.

Our suspicion that we were from a superior class was, perhaps, fuelled by an occasional throwaway statement from Mother that a close relative of ours, Sir Robert Heath of Biddolph Hall in Staffordshire, had one of the oldest baronetcies in the country. This may have been so -- though I doubt it -- but I could never understand why we should take credit for it. If he really existed, I apologise to Sir Robert for trying to drag him down to our level.

The social hierarchy of the village ran something like this:-- The Squire and his family lived at the Hall, a huge mansion set in at least 20

acres of grounds. They were rarely seen by ordinary mortals and it would have been unthinkable for anybody to oppose their will. I think our squire and his brood were quite decent but they wielded tremendous power.

-- The vicar, presumably because he was believed to have direct access to God, was next down the line. In Shenton, there were no professional people, but if there had been, they would have been on the same level as the vicar.

-- Farmers and the schoolteacher came next, and the estate agent probably was on their level.

-- Then craftsmen.-- Below everybody else were the cottagers, who were mostly unskilled labourers.-- And then there was us.

When I retired to Buckingham, a charitable organisation asked me to visit old people. One widow told me two wonderful stories which illustrate the power which used to belong to country squires:

-- Her mother had lovely blond curly hair; the squire's daughter had mousey straight hair. When her mother was still a little kid, the estate agent came to the door and ordered the parents to keep their daughter's hair cropped as close to the scalp as possible; otherwise, they would lose house and job.

-- My visitee's husband, who had died long ago (possibly of mycotoxicosis) was head gardener at the Hall. The squire's wife was a freak who prided herself on eating a wide variety of fungi other than mushrooms. However, she was aware that some might be poisonous so she took the salutary precaution of making Bob (the husband) eat a few of all new finds before she herself tucked into them. My Mrs Brown, when telling me about this, finished by saying almost apologetically: "I never thought it were right to make Bob eat them. And sometimes it made him very sick."

Do not think the social positions were not accepted willingly. It had always been so and one of the biggest jobs of the vicar was to drive home the fact that it always would be so. He regularly prayed that we should be given grace to accept "the state to which it has pleased God to call us".

Strangely, we at our lowly level contrived at the same time to be howling snobs. A family who had recently made a lot of money rented a farm near us at about the time the war ended. As I remember, they were a decent lot but we all despised them because they were judged to be nouveau riche. To be socially acceptable, people not only needed money, they needed to have had it for a long time. I still cannot understand what led to this line of thinking.

Because we were so poor, Mother had to work very hard. For example, the clothes washing for eight people would be quite a job, even with an automatic washing machine. Mother had to do it with a copper for boiling the clothes, a tub for dollying them, a mangle for drying them -- and all water had to be carried from a pump 100 yards away. Our rich relatives had a habit of driving out in their motor cars to visit us unannounced and it must have been difficult for Mother to carry things off when she was caught in such an occupation; and probably feeling deathly tired. But I think she always succeeded.

We kids were bilingual. Around the house, we talked our version of standard English, but, as soon as we got out of earshot of Mother, we dropped easily into the village vernacular. With many an "Ow do?" and "Hey oop!” we fitted in well and had enough wit to realise that local children would have thought we were showing off had we "talked proper".

Barriers between high and low were dropped in a hurry during the pandemic of influenza in 1919. Mother prided herself on her nursing skills and she was, I think, a good nurse. Anyway, when 'flu struck a family, Mother (who was a great friend of the doctor) would not be far behind and all we kids were roped into the fray. Every family except ours suffered and at least one member of every family died. Not only did Mother visit and help them at all hours of the day and night, she cooked for a lot of them and we kids had to keep the soup pans bubbling, and run an errand boy service. When all the other families had recovered, ours went down but we all got better -- after being very ill indeed.

The gamekeeper's family consisted of two boys and a girl who was mentally pathetically and droolingly deficient. They all got 'flu and, although both boys died, the girl survived; and I think this was when I began to doubt if the version of Christianity which I had been taught was correct. Certainly, I gave God little credit for what he had done to the gamekeeper's family.

Omission of the 'flu pandemic from Mother's writing surprised me greatly because I think that, had she never done anything else, her work in this field would have made her worthy of immortality.

In the nearby town of Market Bosworth, we frequently saw a vivid example of life as it was then lived. An enormously fat rich man, who often smoked king-size cigars, took his daily exercise in a bathchair. His chauffeur, who was not all that robust, pulled him around and it looked wrong that fatty should sit back and puff clouds of smoke, while the chauffeur's eyes nearly popped out with effort. I still imagine the fat slob telling the chauffeur: "You may take me home now, James. I'm tired."

Every village in England was, I think, dominated by its church. These churches are enormous buildings and no expense was spared in their construction. The squire, presumably would pay the biggest whack of the building costs but it is sad to speculate upon how many peasants (at least 30 generations) must have had their lives blighted by the burdens which the church put on them.

The church at Shenton was no exception but we felt hard done by because it had no steeple. On the other hand, we kids knew where the key to the tower was hidden and we used, occasionally, to climb a spiral stone staircase which went on forever; looking back, it must have been a bit dangerous but, eventually, we came out on the flat roof of a battlement tower. One day, Ted and I had climbed up and, on the roof, we found a piece of slate, maybe about 4 x 6 inches. In those days, every packet of cigarettes had a card in it and, as well as collecting them, we all had become expert at skimming them. Ted skimmed the slate out over the churchyard and we watched in fascinated horror: it travelled in a long curve and, instantly, we looked from the slate to old Betsy Lee, who was walking along the nearby road. Inexorably, the slate and Betsy converged but, thank goodness, it just missed her and provided the village with a subject for gossip: how a slate had fallen from a clear sky and nearly hit Betsy. Explanations varied from a miracle to a warning to Betsy to mend her ways.

The cigarette cards I mentioned played a surprisingly big part in our lives. The tobacco companies issued them in series: famous footballers and cricketers, steam engines, butterflies and so on. The boy who managed to collect the full set of 50 cards in a series was much admired by the rest of us but getting a whole set was difficult and we suspected that the companies deliberately did not produce one or more cards from each set.

Most of the village went to church. I think our squire was not likely to turn nasty but the inhabitants had been brought up to know that those who did not attend did not prosper. Mother had a good, but powerful, soprano voice and she easily dominated the church singing. We hated it and wished she had been mute.

A job with which we had a love hate relationship was blowing the organ. As the handle was pumped, an indicator in a slot would rise to show air was available; the trouble was: when the organist played, the indicator fell and it needed all the strength we could muster to keep it within playing limits. I once felt heartily ashamed of myself: when the organist gave Onward Christian Soldiers all she'd got, my strength failed and the organ died. I was by no means the only one who failed at this job and our failures hurt more because, I think, we were all deeply in love with the organist, Eva Lee.

The parson was as wet as they come; on one occasion, literally so; the floods were out and I paused to watch him ride his bike through the flood. He rode at a stately pace until water entered his shoes. Then, he took his feet off the pedals, with the

inevitable result. I showed my version of good breeding by not laughing but was able to indulge in our version of dining out on the story for some weeks.

He, the parson, seemed to want us to believe that he made up his sermons as he went along. His script was always hidden under his surplice and we knew exactly where he would surreptitiously slide it out on to the lectern. Then, he pretended he was not reading it; he bowed his head, as though he were seeking inspiration but actually reading the next bit; then he would raise his head to deliver the good words. As a method of estimating how much was left for us to endure, we counted the nods, which varied between 150 and 190. We all longed for him to set up a record by breaking 200 or, even better, not reaching 150. When the number topped 190, tension among the youngsters in church was almost palpable.

I do not know if they still do it but, in those days, parsons always started a sermon by announcing a text and, even when I was very young, I used to wonder if there were any connection between the text and the body of the sermon. Our parson would announce that his text was from chapter x and verse y of the book of z and it was, for example, "He went out onto a hill". He would then tell us what a rotten lot we were and he did not fancy our chances of avoiding hell. It baffled me.

In those days, the parson dished out a careful balance of carrots and sticks but the devil loomed so large in his teaching that we were left with little hope of salvation. Most of us, I think, decided to settle for hell.

In our village, it was not so noticeable because the squire more or less ignored the church but, in most communities, the squire and the vicar were natural allies. For hundreds of years, the church had told its members they should be content to remain in the 'state to which it had pleased God to call them'. And the squire was always in the background to make things unpleasant for anybody who tried to break out of the semi-slavery which was then prevalent in England.

During a dry summer, probably 1919 or 1921, the parson prayed for rain. I decided this posed a bit of a problem for God, because the Australian test team was over here and all we kids were praying hard for fine weather. We were always being taught about the power of prayer but whether the prayer had been answered or not obviously depended on where you were sitting.

CHAPTER 3THE WAY WE LIVED

Mother must have been at her wit's end for money. Father, as seems to have been normal in those days, had left his money in trust for us, so Mother just had the interest which, in those days, was generally less than five per cent. The lengths to which she would go to save money were spectacular and, I think, necessary. Our presents at Christmas and birthdays were strictly of the practical kind: a child who needed a new shirt would get it for his birthday -- if Mother could find the price of the material from which to make it.

Looking back, one or two trifling things have made me wonder just how short the money was. For example, Gretta went to a private school for a year or two; I took 4 years piano lessons from Miss Leake in Nuneaton. I had no aptitude and hated every minute of every lesson -- as, I suspect, did Miss Leake; and Mother took me to have my bumps read. Phrenology was the in thing at that time and I was glowing with pride as I came away from my session: I was, it appeared, a boy of great potential -- but I have succeeded in keeping it well hidden.

In Mother's writing, she implied that she always went to Nuneaton by train. It is lucky that this was by no means so. She carried huge baskets which were weighed down by many dozens of eggs, pounds of butter and chicken carcasses on the way to market; on the return trip, she had the shopping for eight of us and this always included a massive joint of meat from her brother, who was a butcher and outstandingly kind to us. Since the railway station was over a mile from our cottage, carrying would have been a major problem.

Fortunately, we had a mare called Della (because she came from Ashby de la Zouche). We harnessed Della to a trap and she would pull it at a reasonably smart pace over the 7 miles to Nuneaton. As far as I remember we all, regardless of age, drove her. Della played a big part in our lives and we all rode her a lot though, occasionally, she kicked us; I doubt if she was ever really serious about it and, if she had been, Alec, who was probably the best horseman I ever knew, would quickly have sorted her out.

As a family, we quarrelled rather a lot but the rows were generally fairly good natured. The pecking order had, by the time I arrived, become established and I hated to see my brothers squabbling because experience had taught me that, within a few hours, it might come down the line to me. Mother used to infuriate us by reciting:

Little birds in their nest agree And it is a shameful sight When children of one family Fall out, and snarl and fight.

Stealing was a thing which I do not think had ever been discussed but we had unshakeable beliefs about it. The thought of pinching money or other material possessions would have horrified us but stolen food was something to dream about. Apple scrumping was, of course, an important part of our lives and this was curious because we had heaps of trees. And village kids pinched our apples. Also, Bosworth Park was well stocked with Siberian crab trees and, although we found the fruit unbearably sour, we planned and executed successfully a number of elaborate raids in this closely gamekeepered area.

We also practised a method of stealing which now seems to have died out: when Mother went out we made sweets. Chocolate and toffee were the usual product of

our labours, and very good we thought they were. Sometimes, when the culinary efforts went wrong, we had to tackle horrible sticky, runny messes, but we generally made acceptable sweets. And, anyway, we quite enjoyed the failures; they tasted just as they would have, had their consistency been perfect. But they were messy.

Mother made huge fruit cakes. If a cake had been started and the temptation became too much for us, we helped ourselves to thin slices, which never satisfied us. At least twice, we repeated the trimming until, when we realised discovery was inevitable, we ate the lot. When Mother tackled us about who had done what, precepts from the Boys' Own Paper were thrown overboard; not for us the honourable and upright conduct which was so dear to the BOP boys; stout denial and a willingness to lie our heads off were what we depended on. But it rarely worked.

Punishments, when our crimes were discovered, were swift but, to curb our food stealing, obviously were not effective. Psychologists who, in that idyllic age, were mercifully thin on the ground, would have tutt-tutted a bit because Mother hit us hard and instantly when she discovered wrongdoing. This, I believe, was the right thing to do. The modern idea of not punishing until the parent has calmed down is, I think, cruel. Where Mother possibly went wrong was in supplementing the beatings by sending us to bed and withholding food. She may have been right in doing this but we, who were always hungry, found it hard.

Sometimes, life got too much for us and we ran away from home. I think we all did it but, as far as I remember, the others were all like I was: nobody ever knew I had left because hunger always drove me home in time for the next meal. Bidding a tearful good bye to a brother and then finding him lining up for the next meal was commonplace to me. Ted was the only one to achieve fame by running away. While we were still at Westfields, he ran away and hid in a loft. The parents got so worried they called in the police, who started to drag the nearby canal to recover the body. This went on until somebody realised their most enthusiastic helper was Ted.

Although we stole food, Mother saw to it that we had enough to eat. She was what is called 'a good plain cook' and the roast joints we had were fabulous; there must have been at least a stone of wonderfully browned roast potatoes around every one. We all hated rice pudding and this is strange because I love it now and, more important, we knew Mother would always win the battle and make us eat it eventually; but we always rejected it at first. Also, I hated parsnips but I cannot remember any battles over them. Raw swede turnips, we all enjoyed and many a walk was made more enjoyable by the simultaneous ingestion of pick your own swedes. Some village boys ate raw potatoes but we never did.

We all had enormous appetites.

Mother worked hard but she always made a point of having a post-prandial nap; she claimed that, without it, she could not have carried on.

We were a pretty puerile lot and some of our attempts at humour were pitiable. When we went by train to Nuneaton, we passed through Higham on the Hill (pronounced Hi-am) and, in those days, a porter would walk along the platform, shouting the name of each station at which the train stopped. When we drew into Higham, we used to stick our heads out of the window and shout "Who's a fool?" And the porter would walk past shouting "Higham". This always convulsed us with laughter.

And some of our conversations were a bit odd. I well remember a prolonged argument about the school clock at Market Bosworth -- which was nearly always

wildly wrong. After a great deal of talk, we decided that, as it had been on that particular day, we would have had to explain to a stranger that, to get the correct time, he just had to remember that, when the big hand was straight up and the little hand was straight down, it would strike ten -- but the correct time would be seventeen minutes past three. Subjects like this would last us for ages.

Poets like Hilaire Belloc and Thomas Graham appealed to us a lot. Poems such as the following exactly suited our rather macabre sense of humour:

Into the drinking well Which the plumber built her Aunt Eliza fellWe must buy a filter.

And:As I was going down the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish to God he'd go away.

And:The captain of police is dead Through having lost his life. Not very long before he died,That luckless man was still alive.

This simple-mindedness, which gave us an interest in practically everything, however unimportant, was an advantage. We had no radio or television. Many people had begun to build their own radio sets. These sets depended on crystals and cat's whiskers, which had to be bought but those who were short of cash quickly found that shiny yellow pieces of coal (iron pyrites) could be used instead of crystals. We could never get the price of head-phones and cat's whiskers so we never competed on the do-it-yourself bit. When invited to listen to a friend's set, you often needed all your imagination. Some sets, though, really did work but the only programme seemed to be a painfully refined voice repeating over and over "This is 2L0 calling". On a good day, you could hear snatches of music. We felt then that science had progressed about as far as it was ever likely to go.

We had plenty of relatives living nearby and all of them were, by our standards, moderately wealthy. They came to see us from time to time and their obvious affluence did nothing for our inferiority complex -- not that we had ever heard of such a thing. They could always count on freshly made scones, home made butter and jam and clotted cream, so I expect they were rather decent to us but our eagle eyes were always looking for patronising actions. We must have seemed to be, and were, a pretty rough lot of hooligans.

I remember once, when we had been told to look after three cousins while the adults talked inside. The oldest cousin was a clever boy who, later, became an eminent surgeon and, as I remember, he was a decent sort. Alec, presumably trying to keep a high standard of conversation going, exhibited his new boots and he (Alec) proudly pointed to the tag on the back, on which was woven the word 'Society'. Unfortunately, Alec pronounced it 'Soshetty', and the cousin, quite correctly and courteously corrected him. Any of us could have told him he'd made a bad mistake and, sure enough, Alec hit him -- only once but, as always, that was enough. The visit quickly broke up in a welter of frosty farewells. Quite often, we did not get on well

with relatives and I suspect it was mostly our fault, because we suspected they were patronising us. But it must have been a trial to Mother.

We had a lovely, commodious privy at the bottom of the garden. It may not have been as grand as Charles Sale's 'six family three-holer' but it faced South and had two seats so, especially on sunny mornings during the holidays, we formed parties of two, sometimes accompanied by those who hoped to succeed us on the throne; with the sun streaming in, we would spend ages settling the affairs of our little world. Because it's a great aid to clear and deep thinking, I am sure we would get better government if members debated their problems under similar circumstances.

I am pretty sure there were no flush toilets in the village and the only one I knew about was at Mother's Mother's house in Nuneaton. I was terrified of it. It had a long chain going up to an enormous tank. The chain had to be pulled sharply and, after a pause which had to be exactly right, released. If the pause had been well judged, this would he followed by a lot of clanking and the release of a torrent of water into the pan. I always opened the door before I pulled, and then ran away.

The humiliation of not judging the pause correctly, and thus failing to flush, was considerable because everybody in the house could, from the noise, deduce what was going on.

In common with most other houses, including farmhouses, we had no bathroom but I doubt if we ever missed what we had never had. On Saturday evenings, we had terrific water-carrying sessions, put the copper on and got down to using the tin bath. Every family had one of these tin baths and they were well designed for the conditions under which they were used. During winter, we bathed in front of a roaring kitchen fire and it was sheer bliss. Primitive, it may have been; but so were we and we liked it.

Motor cars were a rare sight in the village and, when we saw one, we dropped whatever we were doing and ran after it. I remember they were covered in grand looking, carefully polished brasswork, had huge squeeze horns, enormous brake handles mounted outside the body, and made a lot of noise, sometimes accompanied by a fair amount of smoke. Until a few years before, the law had required a man with a red flag to precede every motor car on the public highway.

The post office and the railways were unbelievably efficient. We got three deliveries a day, the delivery postman accepted letters for posting, the box was cleared every few hours throughout the day, there was delivery and collection on Sunday and I suspect revolution would have started if a letter had taken more than 24 hours between posting and delivery. Now, we have thousands of managers, lots of computers and similar gear, huge fleets of postal vans, a postage rate which is more than 50 times what it was then -- and letters regularly take 5 days or more to be delivered, if they are delivered at all.

The tradesmen who came in their horse-drawn vans were a good lot: courteous, efficient and pleasant. As well as the butcher, baker and grocer, we had regular visits from a tinker who could, and would, repair almost anything. I remember him well, possibly because he had a cadaverous face which did not go well with the huge gaucho moustache he wore. He was very thin and always accompanied by his wife and about three kids. I suspect they slept in the van and were very poor, but he was as friendly as could be.

Although we could not often employ him, a chair mender regularly visited and it was a joy to see him work. During the autumn, he collected and dried rushes, and his skill

at using these to put new seats in chairs was wonderful. He would also mend cane seats but it was his rush work that attracted us.

Occasionally, gypsies would camp nearby and, although we were stuffed full of stories about their insatiable appetite for children, we liked them and considered them to be romantic; and skilled poachers. Why they were alleged to be child stealers, we never knew; they always seemed to have lots of their own. Anyway, I suspect most of us would have collaborated on the kidnapping if they had shown any sign of wanting us. The nomadic, carefree life, which never seemed to include attendance at-school, would have appealed to us. I thought, and still think, that gypsies are a good lot.

There were of course, no street lights and we got much innocent amusement from this. On really dark nights, when we heard one or more person walking towards us, we stepped aside and stood stock still. Snatches of conversation -- sometimes from a solitary person -- could be quite entertaining. Some children are alleged to be afraid of darkness but I and, I think, my siblings found darkness friendly.

Certain happenings always drew all the children of the village; one such was the killing of a pig. We always knew when such things were going to happen but I cannot remember how the information was passed. The horrified fascination of the actual killing appealed to our primitive feelings but the big attraction was: who's going to get the bladder? These urinary bladders were highly prized -- I do not think we had balloons in those days -- but I cannot remember ever being given a bladder. Perhaps I was not popular?

The only provision made for the very old and very poor was what were called workhouses. Here, the indigent, after doing a stint of work, could get an evening meal and breakfast but then had to leave. The route between the two workhouses nearest us passed through Shenton so tramps were common. They tended to be hairy and dirty and farmers believed they were all dangerous thieves but I think most were pretty decent. One awful thing: when an old couple became incapable of looking after themselves, they moved into the workhouse permanently. After going through the front door, the husband was led to the left, the wife to the right, and they never met again.

CHAPTER 4CHILD LABOUR

Mother, obviously, must have been almost overwhelmed with work, seven days a week. Similarly, we children had to shoulder our share of responsibilities. I doubt if either Mother or we were smug about our efforts; we all realised, I think that we had to work hard or go under. None of us, as far as I can remember, was lazy and I am pretty sure that Mother would have taken appropriate action if we bad been; I bet it would have been effective action, too.

In Mother's writing, she implies that she only had one cow but we always had about six throughout the 13 years we were at Shenton. I know because I milked them.

This milk business was a considerable chore for us. School started at 09.00 h six days a week and, to get there, we had to walk 2½ miles. I cannot remember the time at which we used to get up but I remember vividly being no more than a zombie for the first few minutes after forcing myself, or being dragged, out of bed. During the winter, we must have been up particularly early because we had to feed the stock and clean out the sheds. Wheeling muck out in big farm wheelbarrows was particularly difficult because, not infrequently, our muscles were not up to it and the full barrow turned over.

A sentimental onlooker might have found it a romantic sight to see, on winter mornings, candles lit in our bedrooms, then paraffin and wick lanterns swinging out across the field which lay between the cottage and the buildings. But we just found it hard work.

When I was small, I did not, of course, have to face the cows but I paid for this. Griff, the last brother at home with me, left in about 1924 and, for the next 4 years, I was on my own. We probably began to reduce the numbers of stock before I left but I cannot remember this.

A much appreciated perk we got from working with cattle came from the huge barrels of treacle which, in those days, was used as cattle food. When we turned the spigot, a thick stream of treacle would emerge; we dipped our finger in it and loved licking it off. It was splendid but, if we had too much Mother could hear, as well as smell, the evidence of our crimes. "Sniff; sniff; have you boys been eating treacle?" was often a prelude to punishment.

We also ate quite a lot of the locust beans which we sorted out from cattle food.

In those days, farmers put their milk into 17-gallon churns, which were lifted into horse-drawn floats and taken to the railway station, where porters put them on the milk train for London. Some of the porters were marvellously expert at trundling these churns along the station platforms. They did them two at a time and empty ones were spun at great speeds.

After we had taken the milk we needed for ourselves, we had only a few gallons to sell and the neighbouring farmer, who must have been the kindest man I ever knew, agreed to add ours to his churns and pay us the full price at the end of the month. After milking, we had to strain the milk through a huge funnel lined with cloth (flannel, I think) which was supposed to filter out the bits which should not have been there. We then carried the buckets of milk which were for sale along to the farm -- a good furlong away. Most mornings saw some pretty tired boys facing the day at school. And then we had to do a repeat performance in the evenings.

A considerable amount of milk had to be kept to feed us. Also we used to set milk in pancheons (coarse, shallow earthenware pans with outward sloping sides and a diameter of about 2 feet); these were left on slate shelves (thrawls) in the dairy until a thick layer of cream had risen to the top. The cream was skimmed off and put ready for churning for butter, or for clotting.

Churning, also, relied heavily on child power, and a rotten job we thought it was! The transition from cream to butter and buttermilk was sudden and much welcomed by the chap who was turning the handle. Sometimes, the butter appeared quickly but, more often, it took ages. Mother had no doubt about the cause of protracted churning: it was thunder in the air. Opinion in the village was that a witch had cursed it, or that it was a richly deserved punishment for sins committed by the churner. We had a nasty suspicion that the last was the most likely cause in our case.

Mother, very expertly, made the butter into 1 lb pats, with lovely patterns on them. These were sold. We kids always longed to have a go with the wooden clappers which were used to make the pats.

The fact that we kept so much stock on so small an area led to a curious practice which, for all I know, was invented by Mother; certainly I never heard of, or saw, anybody else doing it. We called it 'tenting' and I wonder if this was a corruption of 'tending'? During the spring and summer months, at least two children were bidden to do a job of which we were not over fond. We drove the cows out on to the public highway, so they could graze the grass verges. And there we stayed until evening. Had we remained one at each end of the herd, it would have been sensible but boring. Instead, we foregathered, got lost in our books, played French cricket or other games and not infrequently went to sleep. Sometimes we got so bored that we went for walks. My memory is hazy about this but I remember well that, sometimes, we lost the cows. Generally, they had walked miles on ahead but, occasionally, they would break into a farmer's corn or other delicacy. We were not always the most popular family in the village.

We kept a biggish flock of poultry and sale of their eggs must have helped a bit to keep us solvent but I, and probably my siblings, hated cleaning out and whitewashing their pens. Whether or not our hens supported lice which were particularly virulent, I do not know but, after a session in a hen house, I used to go nearly mad with itching for several hours.

Any fowls which were judged to be not sufficiently productive were candidates for slaughter and, in this situation, we showed we had not progressed far from our savage ancestors. A hen or rooster might, over the years, have become a real family favourite but, when Mother handed down the black spot, it could expect neither mercy nor commiseration from us. We were perfect pragmatists and it is a shame that none of us went into business. Callous little hooligans that we were, we had all the characteristics which lead to success in business.

Our method of slaughtering was, I suspect, original and may be worth describing. Three boys were the irreducible minimum needed for doing the job and there was never any lack of volunteers, or audience. Long strings were tied to the neck and feet of the central character and the boys on the strings, both lying prone, collaborated so that when the bird's neck was across the chopping block, they tightened the strings to hold it there. The third boy, who previously had been earnestly exhorted by the string holders (especially if the strings were a bit on the short side) to strike true, then brought an axe down as hard as he could on the victim's neck, thus severing the head from the body. The foot string was released instantly by its holder and we watched

with frissons of fascinated horror as the headless carcass bounded around the field. We got the same sort of feeling when we watched the villagers' pigs being killed.

This probably sounds, and undoubtedly was, pretty barbarous but I doubt if we could have been classed as cruel. However, during the early 1980s I was instrumental in changing slaughtering practice in poultry packing plants: as a result of four papers which I published and papers from fellow scientists in Germany and Australia, some three quarters of a million birds every day in Great Britain, and far more overseas are saved from great cruelty. I hope somebody up there took notice and punched it into my computer.

After killing the fowl, we had to pluck it and this was a fearsome job. If we tore the skin, we were in big trouble; and Mother would never accept a carcass until all the pin feathers had been removed. What job it was! Then, Mother dressed it and sold it during her Saturday trip to Nuneaton. How she sold these birds, I do not know but suspect that her strength of character, pitted against the weak good natures of her sisters and friends, caused chicken to replace the intended red meat joint on the Sunday luncheon table of many an unwilling household.

Another job we did not like much was cleaning, whitewashing and creosoting cow-byres and hen-houses. We had all read, and enjoyed, Tom Sawyer but, after many futile attempts to use his method of getting help from his friends, we concluded that English boys must be far more worldly wise than their American counterparts. This confirmed what we had learned from the Boys' Own Paper but did not help us to get the work done.

When we grew up, say from 8 years onwards, we got holiday jobs and I think we gave reasonable value for money but tiredness would sometimes play its part. I well remember a hot afternoon when I was stooking (standing sheaves of wheat or oats in clumps, to hasten drying). I lay down for a minute and, long afterwards, woke from a sound sleep to hear pandemonium in a deep ditch at the nearby hedge bottom. With a deal of trepidation or, if you want the truth, trembling with cowardly terror, I peered through the herbage overlooking the ditch and there were two polecats fighting below me. It was about the most vicious thing I have ever seen and the noise was terrific. I believe that wild polecats are now extinct.

Hoeing and thinning turnips -- which were almost always mangolds but we called them turnips -- was a job for which we were much in demand and this was the only job, as far as I can remember, for which we had an agreed rate of pay: so much for each row we hoed. It was jolly hard work and we put in long hours at it.

Our squire was not a great killer of game but the keeper raised pheasants, and partridges were common on the estate, so a few not very elaborate shoots were held each year. Our services were always in demand as beaters; we had to line up and, at a signal from the keeper, walk steadily towards the guns, shouting our heads off and beating any undergrowth with sticks. The pheasants, hand fed and lazy, would unwillingly take wing and the guns, some of whom were expert, would try to shoot them. The trouble was that sometimes the marksmen seemed to be having a crack at us. We accepted that there must be a bit of healthy give and take but an occasional gun was, in our opinion, trying to bag a beater. Nobody was ever badly hurt but most of us got an occasional pellet under our skins. On the whole, we thought fattening pheasants and then shooting them was pretty poor sport which reflected little glory on anybody. But the money was good and the beaters were provided with scrumptious sandwiches and meat pies at lunchtime.

Helping to drive cattle was a chancy business; we never knew what would happen. Assuming they were going to market, as they generally were, we drove them out of their field on to the highway and then almost anything could happen; and generally did. After stopping them from turning down side roads, we had to get past them again to resume our advance guard positions. Sometimes, the cattle took a perverse delight in not letting us overtake them and, egged on by abuse from an irate farmer, we ran ourselves into complete exhaustion. But the cattle often won. When we got near the market, the concentration of cattle on the roads increased and the worst thing of all might happen: ours would get mixed with another herd. It could be exciting but, more often, it was just frustrating. And of one thing we could be sure: if anything had gone wrong, it was always our fault.

Curiously, I have no memory of ever having helped to drive sheep. Quite big flocks were kept locally but I have no memory of them being driven.

Closer to home was our garden -- a big one and, in our opinion, too big. Mother was exceedingly good at creating and maintaining super herbaceous borders but we had to raise all the vegetables. I doubt if we ever had much enthusiasm for gardening but, with Mother's sanctions in the background, we managed to grow big crops of potatoes, onions, leeks, beans, peas, marrows and other vegetables. I cannot remember growing brassicas but I suspect this is another example of a failing and selective memory.

We had stacks of apple, pear, plum, damson and quince trees but we never achieved the status of being strawberry and raspberry growers. Anyway, we hated picking fruit unless we were eating all of it.

Mother often rebuked us for our lack of enthusiasm by quoting:Our England is a garden and a garden isn't madeBy saying "Oh, how beautiful" and sitting in its shade; For better men than you my boy began their working livesBy grubbing weeds from gravel paths with broken dinner knives.

I still dislike Kipling.

I suppose my keeping of bees could be classed as work but it never seemed like a duty; I was so interested in the bees that it was sheer pleasure and I spent many hours just lying in front of the hives and watching how the bees worked. It all started when I helped the gamekeeper take a swarm. When he'd got it safely in a straw skip, he asked me if I wanted it. Did I not! He also gave me the skip and lent me a book, so I was well launched. I do not remember where I got the glass dome (for all I know I might have robbed a graveyard -- the matter was so important to me!). After I removed the bung at the top of the skip and replaced it with the dome, I was amazed at the speed with which the bees filled it with honey. It was remarkable how much honey you can get from a skip and I sold it all to our relatives. Some of them did not seem all that keen to buy and all of them looked startled when they heard my price. However, they must have been a generous lot. Later I got proper hives and, one year, I averaged a hundredweight of honey from each of my three hives -- I think in 1926.

CHAPTER 5 RECREATION

Although so much of our time was given over to work, my memory seems to be a bit selective. Just as all summers, in retrospect, were hot, much of my memory is taken up by recreation. And, undoubtedly, our favourite relaxation was reading.

We were all great readers and, willy nilly, most of our reading was of good literature. For a reason which was not apparent to us then, and still escapes me, comics were classed as works of the devil. Also, anything pornographic was, of course, beyond the pale but Mother did not seem to realise that some of the classics, including the bible, were quite helpful to developing boyish minds. Prurient little beasts that we were, things like Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Byron's Don Juan claimed a lot of our attention when we became older. And that great and good man, King David's affair with Bath Sheba, and many other bits of the bible, we found most enjoyable. Nevertheless, most of our reading was good.

Most of George Eliot's works were available to us and we had a good many Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert and Dumas, as well as Dickens. The strong French slant to our reading may have been a hangover from Mother's French origin; her people had come over only a few generations before. They were alleged to have been Huguenots, and almost certainly would have been part of the exodus from France when, in 1685, the Edict of Nantes (1598) was revoked.

As well as the good stuff, there were some appallingly uninteresting volumes written by religious zealots -- mostly missionaries -- who were by no means good writers. Occasional influxes of Rider Haggard, Sabatini, Sapper, Edgar Wallace and similar thriller writers came like rain to a parched desert, and we were great students of Sherlock Holmes. I still read a lot of light stuff.

Because the number of books available to us was limited, we read and reread many of them. This, I believe, is a good thing to do. We were taught that it was wrong (I think 'immoral' would better describe what we were taught) to skip when reading and this pernicious doctrine blighted all my early reading. I am now, and intend to remain, a great skipper.

We certainly identified closely with the characters about which we read and I have vivid memories of my sister Gretta and me, locked in each other's arms and crying our eyes out because the hero was getting a poor deal. When we were short of reading matter, we frequently shared a book and the faster reader would constantly urge the slower to get a move on.

One great difficulty we had to contend with during our reading was light. Our oil lamps (wick and paraffin) did not give much in the way of light, and candlelight was dreadful. But the most important problem came during summer evenings: is it worth the fag of lighting a lamp if you're going to bed within the next 5 minutes?

So that Mother would not see the light at the edges of ill-fitting doors, we used to hold the candle under the bedclothes when we were reading in bed. Not easy, and rather dangerous!

When, during the first 12 years of our married life, Effie and I lived in an isolated cottage in Cumberland, this problem of whether or not it was worth lighting a lamp was still annoying. I think being able to get light out of a switch was the most exciting thing our later houses had to offer.

An unusual thing we had was a bagatelle board, from which we got great pleasure. It is the only such board I ever heard of and you will see from my Mother's autobiography that it was bought for the Christmas before my Father died. It must have cost a lot. A beautifully made flat mahogany box about 4 feet long and more than 3 feet wide opened out to reveal a green baize lined interior, with cushions similar to those on a billiard table. The balls, too, were about the same size and quality but the object of the game was, with cues, to propel the balls into numbered ivory lined depressions. It was not easy and we loved playing it.

The day to day life of the hamlet provided us with a great deal of interest. The carpenter's shop was always worth a visit and, if we behaved ourselves and made ourselves useful, we were allowed to stay as long as we liked. The carpenter was highly skilled and he loved wood. When he picked a piece up, his hands, as well as his eyes, were used to judge its quality. A fine piece of oak, yew, walnut or similar wood would produce a look of ecstasy on his face. He could make anything: wonderful cupboards or farm wheelbarrows, it was all one to him and the only way he knew how to work was to put perfect craftsmanship into everything he did.

When he made a cart or waggonette (a huge long vehicle with four wheels used mainly for carrying enormous loads of hay or corn), every kid in the village was delighted because carts need wheels and highlights of our lives were provided by these wheels. The carpenter built the huge hub of the wheel around the wheel bearing. Into the hub, he let the spokes, and the outer ends of the spokes were let into the fellys (sections of the wooden perimeter of the wheel). The fabulously skilful work which went into making this was interesting to watch but rimming the wheel was a sight fit for the gods. Every kid in the village attended and the select few who were allowed to help achieved a considerable boost in social status among their peers.

The rim was about 4 to 5 inches wide and made of quite thick iron. Diameter of the wooden wheel was slightly greater than that of the cold diameter of the rim. The rim, laid flat on the ground, had a lot of wood piled around it and this was kindled to make a fire, circular, with a hollow centre. When the rim was cherry red, it was lifted by three strong men, using a long iron bar and an ingenious home-made tool, and manoeuvred into a position from which it could be slipped over the wheel; this, it did easily because heat had increased its diameter. Then, water was quickly poured over it, to quell the flames on the burning wheel and to clamp the rim on tightly. We children, I think, probably felt as much quiet pride as the carpenter did, at having done a good job well.

I think I was the only one who enjoyed helping the blacksmith; at least, I cannot remember ever having company when I was there. His fire was blown by an enormous bellows, which the visitor was expected to work by its pump handle. His biggest job was shoeing horses and it was a delight to see his skill. He made all the shoes himself and even really nasty horses seemed to realise that, in him, they had met their master. Mother seems to have found the smell of burning hoof a bit objectionable but it was like attar of roses to me. The smith would also make anything needed in thy way of forged ironware.

We had no pub in Shenton but the blacksmith was a notorious Saturday night drinker. Every week, he walked the few miles to Dadlington and, when he was chucked out of the pub at closing time, he was faced with the problem of walking home. He was alleged to be dangerous when drunk (he was immensely strong) so nobody interfered with him and many a night he spent on the roadside. I think he must have been a lonely man, who would have responded to friendship. When I was working with him, we never said a word to each other but, when I told him I had to go he would, after a pause during which I worried myself sick that he would not do it, heat a piece of strap

iron to cherry red, then I would carry it in tongs and lay it carefully poised just over a great gob of spit which he had put on the anvil -- always in the right place, and he never seemed to aim. Then, he would hit the iron a terrific blow with a 4 lb machine hammer or, sometimes, a sledge hammer. This produced a report comparable to that of a 12 bore shotgun and enormous sparks filled the shop. The satisfaction of that explosion more than repaid me for hours of bellows blowing; I used to walk home in a daze of delight.

The gamekeeper, who was kind and helpful to us, allowed us to help him a lot. Again, I cannot remember being accompanied by anyone else but surely my memory is at fault; not many things offered more chances of excitement than did a day with the keeper. What I remember most was the ferreting. We would put nets over all the holes we could find in a warren and then put ferrets in. Often, the ferrets wore collars to which long cords were attached but we sometimes put them in roaming free. The free ones were liable to kill a rabbit and stay down to eat it. Similarly, a line ferret might go under a root but, on the way back, go over it and tie itself up. In both cases, we had to dig them out and this could be a problem. I cannot remember us ever using muzzled ferrets.

To get away from the ferrets, the rabbits would bolt. If they used a netted hole, we had to de-net them and quickly net the hole again. This de-netting was a skilled job at which, by my standards, I became quite good. If we had failed to net a hole, the keeper shot the rabbit which bolted.

One thing I never did manage was to catch a rabbit by hand when it emerged from an un-netted hole; I think the speed and strength of the rabbit was too much for me. The keeper loved showing off his ability to do this, and he never missed.

Road mending was a job which, though not compulsive viewing, interested us a lot. We knew all about tar macadam roads but we aspired to nothing so grand. Stones crushed from rocks into pieces about the size of big hens' eggs were dumped in cart load lots on the grass verges and the road men used them to fill in pot holes. When a stretch of road became very bad, a big gang of menders would come along, together with vast quantities of stone and a steam roller. We generally got on well with these workmen and it was interesting to see their ingenuity about making meals; as well as making bucketsful of tea, they fried eggs, bacon and sausages on clean round mouthed shovels. We loved to see this and they used dripping for fat so we envied them the bread they fried before expertly transferring the egg on to it. But the great joy came from watching the steam roller. We all, from physics, knew all about the governor and watching it actually working really did please us. That we could ever become the driver of such a vehicle was too much to hope for but we would bustle around and help when the boiler needed more water. In return, the driver would occasionally blow his whistle.

I doubt if we ever did settle our relationship with nature. Nobody had ever told us about conservation, so I suppose we were an example of primitive man learning to live with his environment. Thank heaven we had no guns, because our feelings could be fairly accurately summed up by the aphorism: if it moves, kill it. Fortunately, we were singularly unskilful at killing.

Our main weapons were catapults and slings but, had we stood in for the boy David, I bet Goliath would have died a natural death at a ripe old age. We could throw (we called it "yack", presumably from the latin jaco, jacere, jaxi, jactum -- to throw) stones a great distance with these implements but our aim was, alas, abysmal. Nevertheless, we used to make up parties to go nudging -- a word which my dictionary thinks means "a dig in the ribs" but we used it to mean "hunting birds".

Having collected as many stones as we could carry, we set off one down each side of a hedge. As the birds flew out, we fired stones at them and many a bird was killed as we told of our exploits to those who had not been with us. But I doubt if we ever did any damage.

I like to think we had worked out a bit of conservation practice and, to support my belief, I could quote two examples: when we took eggs from a wren's nest, we always licked our fingers before we explored it. We were convinced, on no evidence at all, that failure to observe this rite would cause the bird to forsake its nest; and when we robbed a water hen's nest (the eggs, hard boiled, were at least as good as plovers' eggs), we left a few in and marked the ones we had left. Unfortunately, these practices were purely to help us. There was a big local barter market in birds' eggs, so it was to our interest if the wren laid a few more eggs. And we found we could con a water hen into laying every day for weeks and, when she appeared to have stopped, we took the whole nest full. These eggs were a great addition to our diet. After collecting a batch, we put them into a receptacle full of water, built a fire and hard boiled them. They were fabulous.

As birds' nesters, we were brilliant. I cannot remember that any one of us was better than the others but, when Spring came, we quickly mapped out, mentally, every nest in the area and we were pretty kind to the birds. We all had big collections of eggs, blown by making a pin hole at each end and kept in boxes of bran or sawdust, and we took as many as we needed for our collections, or for trading. But we never took all the eggs from a nest and we always avoided damaging the nest. Indeed, if we suspected a bird were sitting, we never went near it.

A few farmers still mowed hay and corn using scythes and cradles when I was young but this method had almost given way to mechanical reapers, which we called binders because they bound the sheaves with twine, and mowing machines for hay. Unfortunately, these mowing machines and binders have probably eradicated those lovely, if raucous, corncrakes. They could easily avoid men with scythes but most of them lost their legs when machines came along.

Two, or more often three, horses pulled the binders and, when they appeared in a field, so did we. Rabbits in quite big numbers lived in the growing corn and, as the binders ate away at the crop, rabbits began to bolt across the open ground to the hedges. Often, there would be a man with a shotgun there and many hearty cursings we took for getting between him and his target. But we all had sticks, bags of enthusiasm and, often, a dog to help us. Many of the bunnies got away but we generally killed some.

From the field, the corn sheaves were taken to the rick yard at the farm and built into stacks. Some workers took great pride in building the stacks perfectly and the straw thatching was a wonderful example of skilled workmanship; held down by thack pegs (wooden pegs about 18 inches long and sharpened at one end so they could be driven into the stack) to which binder twine was tied, they had, at each end of the ridge, beautifully made corn dollies.

When the threshing machine came, we and pretty well every dog in the village gathered to kill the enormous population of rats which lived in each rick. I suppose some got away but we killed most of them.

These orgies of killing did not, I think, do us any harm mentally. We were participating in the survival of the fittest struggle which has always gone on. In this case, it was the human community against rats and rabbits and the rats and rabbits did not come off too badly; most of the time.

Steam ploughing was another farming activity we liked to watch, but we were not made welcome. Most ploughmen boasted that, with a good team of horses, they could plough an acre every day. They certainly made an elegant job of their ploughing. I do not know how many acres a steam plough could do in a day but it must have been a good many. A steam engine attached by a cable to a multi-furrow plough on the other side of the field pulled the plough across, switched it across to the next set of furrows and another engine pulled it rapidly back again. We would gladly have collaborated but the men were working so hard and quickly that they had no time for us, so we had to watch from a field away. I cannot remember, and probably never managed to find out, how they reversed the shares and mouldboards at each end of the field. They were very fast but, to our eyes, made a terrible job and they gradually disappeared.

We lived in the swankiest fox-hunting county in England and meetings of hounds were fairly frequent. Our patronage went mainly to the Cottesmore and Atherstone packs and we loved attending the meets. Snobs that we were, we always used the proper terms but, later, we became a bit bolshie and talked loudly about red coats, dogs, tails and so on.

I remember well what a super sight it was to see hounds in full cry, with the hunt streaming over the hedges behind them. I also remember our sense of outrage when they dug out a fox. Not fair! we thought. Another thing which drew censure from us was the practice of blocking up earths before the hunt. In other words, we approved of the fair chase, but condemned the men with their terriers and spades. Most farmers accepted the hunt with good grace -- possibly because many of them would have been driven out of their farms had they objected. I doubt if any of them believed the oft repeated story that, if hunts did not exist, foxes would overrun the countryside. Members of the hunt could be powerful enemies to farmers who did not make them welcome.

In those days, the countryside was studded with square red boards on long stakes planted in hedges. These warned the hunt of barbed wire in the hedge. Often, hunts sent men around to remove the wire in the autumn and put it up again in the spring. Fox hunts, I think, are harmless but expensive amusement for the very rich. But I still feel they should not dig foxes out of earths.

Apart from cricket which, even if we had not liked it, we would never have dared say so, the only other pursuit of any importance that I can remember was archery. We, of course, never had professionally made equipment but we took a lot of trouble about making our own. Some of our bows were enormously powerful but, after getting help to string them it was all we could do to bend, let alone aim, them. Our arrows were works of art and many an unwilling village hen was the donor of feathers. Also, we insisted on making arrows 'a clothyard long'. The way we looked at it was: what was good enough for Robin Hood and our army at Agincourt should be about right for us. Though we were not too sure how long a clothyard was.

Cinemas played no part in our lives. The nearest was at Nuneaton, we had not got the price of a ticket and, anyway, they were haunts of sin, run by the devil and his assistants. Quite attractive, they sounded -- but we never had enough money to go in.

CHAPTER 6OUR KNOWLEDGE OF NATURE

It is difficult, after nearly 70 years, to remember everything clearly but I am pretty sure that our knowledge of flowers and animals was extensive. I cannot remember anybody teaching us anything about all this but all of us and, I think, every kid in the village, seemed to have this wide knowledge about living things.

Mother probably guided us to our expertise in plants; she knew all of them and, I suspect, did not hesitate to pretend that she did even when she did not. Later, I believe she took a correspondence course in herbalism but, even in the Shenton days, she had lots of faith in herbs and claimed to have a cure for practically everything.

I think that many of her remedies were effective. As with doctors in those days, Mother's panacea for any ailment was "a good clean-out" and her medicine for this was magnificent; I do not know what she used but it must have been jolly poisonous because, within an hour or so of taking a foul decoction, the patient would be in serious trouble. Another attack on disease was to "sweat it out of your system" and, again, she had the stuff to do it effectively. If you had a chest complaint, Mother had a certain cure: an embrocation that she made from something like conc. sulphuric acid. It was terrible and not many patients would risk a second application by claiming their chest complaint had not disappeared. "0h, Death, where is thy sting?” tended to take on a clearer meaning after a patient had received Mother’s medicine.

The Christian belief that disease was a manifestation of the wrath of God was strong in Mother -- and in most of her generation. Always, there was an obvious and sinful cause of disease in children: colds indicated that the culprit had taken his vest off or had sat on wet grass; toothache followed eating too many sweets; headaches followed too much reading; and so on.

Mother was sold on the widely held belief that, when winter had passed, the body needed a good shaking up. So, in common with every other child in the village, we knew the Spring equinox would be accompanied by a huge dose of brimstone and treacle. Fortunately, we all liked the stuff, though we were not too keen on its effects.

As a nurse, Mother was undoubtedly good. She kept a wary eye open for malingerers but, after deciding that we really were ill, she was superb. In winter, that luxury of luxuries, a bedroom fire, was provided and I remember with deep gratitude that we were dosed with as much linseed tea as we liked. I am pretty sure this was made by boiling linseed (flax seed) for quite a while, then adding lots and lots of lemon juice. For all I know, I would not like it now but, in those days, it was bliss to feel it slipping over a sore throat or other complaint. With this on the bedside table and a fire flickering shadows over the walls, we felt like little kings.

We helped Mother's medical activities by collecting, to order, a wide variety of plants: purple loosestrife, mallow, spurge, campion, burdock, comfrey and lots of other lovely evocative names were ordered and I think we knew all of them. Mother dried and used them as needed. A year's course in toxicology has led me to believe that a good dollop of caution is needed if you want to practice herbalism -- and avoid being charged with manslaughter.

It may be that Mother guided us in the world of botany but I cannot guess who taught us about animals; and yet we knew, or thought we knew, most things about them. Certainly we knew, and could recognise the nests of, all the birds; and other animals were easy. The only doubt I have of our knowledge concerns goshawks. There were lots of them around and the gamekeeper, who hated them, called them "goshawks"

but my bird book implies they were rare in England until some escaped from a falconry in 1960. Kestrels and sparrow hawks were common but the "goshawks" were much bigger.

We sometimes queried the wisdom of nature. Pigeons, I remember, irritated us exceedingly: they built their nests with such flat tops that eggs were forever rolling off them. We found such inefficiency vastly annoying.

I am now exceptionally ignorant about plants and animals, and I think our childish knowledge was a result of our environment; we lived in the country and, apart from reading and cricket, our only interests and amusements were the countryside. Ergo, we thought about little else and never stopped learning.

Wise women were common, and respected, up to the middle ages, but they then became known as "witches" and many were persecuted and executed. In England, ducking stools were common, and some still stood when I was young. The suspect was strapped in the stool and ducked under water for a considerable time; if she drowned, she was innocent but being still alive after immersion led to her execution as a witch. By the time we came along, these barbarities had ceased but old age and rational talking by a woman still provided cause for suspicion that she might be a witch. There were no strong suspects in Shenton but we kept a wary eye open.

As well as possible witchcraft, folklore played a big part in our life. I have already mentioned the butter churning, but there were other strange beliefs. Dates for sowing seeds, shearing sheep, turning cattle out for the summer and bringing them in for the winter, and many other things were closely dependent on the phases of the moon. Many villagers would not bath unless the moon was just right. We all believed that, if a hand were placed, however fleetingly, in the middle of a newborn calf's back, the calf would die during the next 24 hours; I am a vet, but I still would not touch a calf's back! If goose grease (a greatly prized cure-all, this) were rubbed on a patient's back, it would appear on its chest three days later. And, all weather forecasting was done from the moon.

These are the only bits of folklore I remember but there was much more. Everybody's complete belief in the folk claims is curious; it would have been so easy to have refuted most of them. But maybe we all enjoy a bit of mystery and magic!

CHAPTER 7FOUR BLESSINGS

There were four things in the Shenton countryside which were of particular benefit to us: the spinney; the canal; plentiful pits; and the river.

The wood from which Mother's dawn chorus came was just across the lane from our cottage. We always called it the spinney and there would have been much less fun and adventure in our lives if it had not been there. I cannot remember plainly the species of trees in the spinney but I am pretty sure that oak and elm were dominant. Certainly, there were a few almost impenetrable thickets in it.

The part which we gradually came to consider as being our own private property was roughly triangular and lay between two streams which met at one of the angles of the triangle. Our patch was, I suppose, only about 5 acres but it was big enough for our purposes.

Dominating the whole wood was a rookery, which began right opposite our cottage, so we never needed alarm clocks. These rooks provided us with quite a bit of our education, especially during the spring. Their nests, made of sizable sticks, caused a lot of bad feeling. As you might expect, there was an abundance of sticks suitable for nest building lying beneath the trees, and most rooks played the game, collecting their own sticks. Unfortunately, and just as in human communities, there were always a few four-letter rooks who pinched their neighbours' sticks. As far as we could judge, these predator rooks were always successful. Just like humans!

This may have been the first step in my education about life. I had been brought up on fatuous precepts like 'Honesty is the best policy' and 'Cheats never prosper'. From the rookery, I got lots of evidence to show that wise sayings are often wrong. Later on, I concluded that cheats are the ones who really do prosper.

Every spring, there was a rook shoot. It was organised by the gamekeeper and most of the guns were farmers. I cannot remember anybody inviting us but it was one of the biggest events of our years; we always turned up and were, I think, useful. It was timed to occur when the young rooks had ventured from their nests but could not yet fly. As the young rooks were shot, we ran to pick them up and we quickly found out that a wounded rook can, and given the slightest opportunity, will peck like a sledgehammer. Many a sore hand was nursed during the weeks after a shoot.

At the end of the shoot, we were given as many rooks as we could carry. We took them home, skinned out the breasts and legs, and Mother used them to make huge rook pies. We loved these and I think they really were good. It is probable that the meat was what is called 'strong' but Mother always cooked the pies in such a manner that they were swimming in rich dark gravy when they were opened. I suspect our social betters would have sneered at rook pie but, to us, it was fit for a gourmet.

There was a heronry not far away and we loved watching them fish. Admittedly, we had vague ambitions to kill them but I formed the opinion that they were intelligent birds -- much wiser than we were because, as we got near enough to strike, they always rose lazily into the air. Their eyesight must have been excellent: I have no memory of ever seeing one make an abortive strike. Two of my brothers (I cannot remember which) claimed to have seen a heron kill (by shaking it) a water hen which seemed to be annoying it by swimming too close.

A wonderful thing, to us, occurred in the spinney. Griff and I had been sent to church by ourselves so, naturally, we did not go. Wandering along a bank of the spinney

river, we saw a big fish in shallow water. We must have planned our campaign carefully because, quite quickly, we had beached it. It was certainly a sea trout or salmon and it must have weighed about 5 lb. Having lost its way coming in from the North Sea, it probably kept going until it landed up on our table. Mother's principles and religion came under severe strain when we took our prey home but, as always, she triumphed. She knew that we certainly had not been to church and, anyway, we were forbidden all but religious activities on 'the sabbath'; on the other hand, there was all that lovely food to think of so she acted correctly: pretended she believed our quite impossible story of how the fish had more or less fallen into our hands as we walked home from church. I suspect most people are expert at compromising when it suits them, and Mother must have been way up among the best at making her religious principles bend as much as was needed.

In the chapter on child labour, I probably made it sound as if we were hard workers. And so we were, but our work for Mother was as nothing compared with what we put in when we built a tree house. We tackled about one each year, always in the spinney. First, we selected a suitable tree, remembering that the spinney was well stocked with man-eating tigers and other odds and ends which, with incredible bravery, we were constantly obliged to kill. Then we collected pieces of wood, sawn as well as natural. The labour of hauling these pieces up a tall tree, fastening them to the branches and walling the whole house with sacking was considerable; each house took weeks to complete. These houses were acutely uncomfortable, jolly dangerous and, as far as I remember, quickly abandoned.

We were lucky to have a canal nearby. Where it came nearest to us, it crossed over (above) our road to the railway station and, though it was nothing to do with us, we were intensely proud of the aqueduct; no nearby village had one. It's a wonder this aqueduct was not responsible for a few serious injuries. The slope of the wall which retained the dirt bank ran from canal height to road at about the slope which free-flowing soil settles for, and it offered an irresistible temptation to see who dared drop off it at a point higher than any other kid would risk. I, in my usual cowardly way, never offered serious competition in this game but, even so, I got some terrible jolts when I hit the floor far below.

The barges, which now seem to be called narrow boats, which used this canal were strictly of the working variety but we all envied the bargees their life. They were exceptionally foul-mouthed, their children never went to school and they were always travelling into the world beyond. And who could possibly want a better life? But, although we admired them, I do not think we were very friendly to them -- or they to us. I know they often chased us and I can remember retaliating by dropping sods (the turf kind) into their barges as they passed under the bridges.

Barge horses were magnificent and full of character. Generally of the Shire breed, they were very strong and the bargees looked after them well. All those tons of coal, stone or similar cargoes must have had enormous inertias and the horses were skilled at getting them moving, without too much effort; after the start, they had an easier job. The brasses of the horses, and those on the barges, could not have been polished more highly. These, together with the wonderful designs which the bargees painted on their homes, made them an attractive sight.

The canal itself was a joy to us. According to how long it had been since a barge passed, the water varied from rich muddy to fairly clear. It was well-stocked with fish and, in hot summers, pike would lie almost on the surface, apparently sunning themselves, though I have never heard that fish enjoy doing this. Most of these pike were about 2 feet long but we saw a few memorable ones.

This, I suppose, is a good time to mention our angling prowess and I can say at once that it was nothing to write home about. Looking back, our inability to imitate Izaac Walton was associated with our abject poverty. In story books, barefoot boys with bent pins on the ends of string lines tied to long sticks can catch fish but, according to our experience, they can't.

The very few times when we caught big numbers of biggish fish seem to have coincided with our possession of fish hooks -- probably given to us by a cousin or bought with bits of earned money. The catches were almost entirely of perch and we always ate them. Coarse fishermen, nowadays, return all their catch to the river (so they say!) but we would have regarded such an action as lunacy.

As a swimming pool, the canal could not have been better designed, though we had to take heed of the weeds when we dived.

In our day, probably about one field in six had a pit and these were just what you would imagine them to be: water-filled depressions in the ground. I have no idea of how they were made but most of them were roughly circular, had bushes on the edge and reeds growing in the water. A few of the bigger ones had big perch in them. They were designed to provide water for stock. Maybe a few pits remain but they must be rare. Many villages had ponds beside the village green, presumably to make it handy for ducking witches, but by my definition a pond is a much grander affair than a pit. A good example is extant at Mill Hill.

Anybody who takes an interest in biology will not need to be told that each pit was a world on its own and was teeming with life. During summer, the dragon-fly larvae, water boatmen, frogs and a host of other things made them deeply interesting to us. With their eternally twitching tails (what is this twitching for, I wonder?) the water hens were most interesting to us and they never seemed to pause in their search for food. When they were surrounded by their fluffy offspring, we thought they looked wonderful -- probably because we were aware that this year's chicks will be next year's egg producers.

Mother got the direction of the flow of the river wrong; we were at the high end of the village (I imagine about 2 feet high) and the river flowed from our cottage to the other side of the hamlet. As rivers go, it was not worth much and, in dry weather it was a bit stagnant, but it suited us.

Where our branch met the bigger bit, at the end of the spinney, we could just distinguish whirls in the water. Naturally, the pool in which they met was called the whirly hole and it had a terrible reputation. It was quite deep -- probably more than 10 feet. Everybody in the village believed that those who fell into the whirly hole would be sucked down and never seen again. And most of the villagers would tell grim stories, packed with gruesome detail, of people who had suffered this fate in days long gone by. Why we swallowed this story, I do not know; we were all good swimmers but, to the day I left Shenton, I believed every word about the whirly hole.

The rest of the river was just right for us. It was well stocked with minnows, gudgeons, bullheads and sticklebacks, which could be caught by hand from where they lurked beneath the stones. After putting them into the traditional jam-jar with a string handle, we would tip them back into the river. Our obsession with catching live things must, surely, have been the expression of something primitive in us.

Kingfishers were plentiful. They nested in a vertical bank of the river near our spinney and, to our credit, we never tried to get their eggs because we realised it would involve destroying their nest. We spent hours watching them catch little fish

and were lost in admiration of their ability always to catch the fish head-first after throwing them into the air.

Dams were often built and we had ambitious plans to make a bathing pool, but big stones were almost non-existent in the area and we soon learnt the drawbacks of using mud as damming material.

The river was well stocked with what we called "water rats", though we knew they were voles. The Wind in the Willows was not available to us so we did not treat them with proper respect; when we saw them we threw stones at them but I cannot remember ever hitting one.

Sewage disposal was no problem for the village: it all went, untreated, into the river and this probably explained the prime condition of the little fish.

Cursory examination of the Heath kids' upbringing might lead to a belief they were a rather deprived family but the spinney, the river, the pits and the canal went far toward giving us a rather rich childhood. If it's possible to be rich when you have no money!

CHAPTER 8TED'S ILLNESS

Ted's illness was such a blow to us that it deserves a chapter on its own. The biggest blow, of course, was to Ted but we were such a close-knit family that every one of us was stunned at the thought that one of us could die. And we all realised that his illness could have been fatal. In those days, iron lungs were still at the experimental stage and life support machines did not exist. Poor Ted's muscles on one side were paralysed and the trouble was that he had got to keep breathing; for a long time, he was pretty finely poised over the valley of the shadow.

After I came back from Canada, in 1936, he told me of one incident which had obviously upset him badly. He was aware that he, and others who were likely to die at any moment, were put into beds which were close to the sister's desk; curtains were drawn around the bed when a patient died. Ted had fallen deeply in love with a Nurse Locke and, according to him, she had encouraged him. One night, the patient alongside Ted died and, seeing the closed curtains when she came on shift, Locke, in a tone of bouncy good humour, said to another nurse: "I see poor old Heath died last night". Ted said he put his head under the clothes and wept for hours.

Mother was at her best during his illness but the temptation to throw her hand in must have been great. We children, of course, did not know all the details but it is easy to picture the problems she faced. By all sorts of scheming and artifice, she was just keeping her head above water financially; and the work she had to do was all she could manage. Suddenly, she was faced with having to spend a lot of money on train fares and spend a considerable time each week away from home. And still the work at home had to be done and we all had to be fed and clothed. How she did it, I do not know.

Towards the end of his year in hospital, Mother just could not afford train fares and had to cut down the frequency of her visits. Ted, with his upbringing, understood well why she could not come but, from what he told me in later years, it was a bitter blow. I do not remember that any of his siblings ever got in to see him. You might wonder why we did not save up to get train fares: but save up from what? We had no money and, if we were tipped or earned any, we turned it over to Mother. Anyway, it is doubtful if children would have been allowed to visit in those days.

When he came home, we went nearly mad with joy and we all made the most absurd presents to welcome him. I cannot remember what the others gave but I came up with a pair of knitted garters -- of varying width throughout their length. Why garters? Because we all went through a laborious "in, over, through, off" process of learning to knit and we always knitted garters -- though I would have defied anybody to find a use for them. And talking of knitting, Ted became an extraordinarily expert knitter of socks when his children were small.

There was a short time after he came home when he became fantastically autocratic. I think it may have been because he had been a pawn so long that he wanted to chuck his weight about. However, this stage did not last long and we were so pleased to have him back that he could have flogged all of us every day, without arousing any resentment.

Actually, his muscles were so wasted that he was unable to do much of anything and, looking back, I think we were an effective form of therapy. Ted wanted to play games and we wanted him to play and, between us, we thought out lots of things to do. Inevitably, cricket dominated everything and, while his bed was under the chestnut tree, we had a low stool turned on its side beside the bed, for a wicket. When we

bowled him out, or caught him, he took over the bowling. I am pretty sure that all this muscular activity must have been good for him.

The squire kindly lent us a bath chair and what an asset that was! It was as unlike a modern wheel-chair as you could possibly get. Beautifully made of cane basketwork, it was built on generous lines, so that half a dozen rugs could cushion the patient. The well thought-out curves of the basketwork turned it into a work of art. There were three wheels: quite a big one on either side and a smaller one in front. Attached to the small wheel, was a long handle ending in a wooden grip; this handle could be used by a man who pulled, or it could be turned through 180° and used by the occupant to steer the chair. All wheels had really luxurious pneumatic tyres.

These chairs were by no means confined to people who were ill. I believe their name (from the spa city of Bath) described their original use; rich people were pushed in them to and from the baths at the mineral water spas to which the Victorians were so addicted.

The one lent to Ted quickly became a potent source of pleasure to him. We would push him to the top of a nearby steep hill, give him the steering handle, push him down the hill until we could run no faster, and then let go. This was typical of the heady pleasures available to us in those far-off days. Spoilt rotten, we were!

As he progressed to walking, we took him about with us more, and I think our attitude to his infirmity was about right. When he came home, we were filled with pity for him but, quickly, he became just one of us.

Also, he had learnt the correct attitude to illness: he accepted what happened to him. This, I know by experience, is essential. And, equally important, he did not whine about his physical defects.

Ted went on to become head of a university department and I suspect that, with his guts, intelligence and personality, he was bound to get on well. But Mother was outstandingly helpful to him. Faced with a bedfast cripple returning from hospital, she at once began to plan his future. Helped by the kindness of our Dr Keeling (who was a prince among good Samaritans) and Ford-Smith, headmaster of the Dixie, she made sure he got his basic education. After this, she bullied the local education lot and got him into university. Once he was launched, nothing could keep him back.

He was a good fellow.

CHAPTER 9SCHOOL DAYS

I, and probably other children in those days, got little pleasure from school. Whether or not it did much for my education, I still have not decided.

We all started at the village school and the quality of life at these must have depended almost entirely upon the head master of mistress, though the school inspector in those days was a dreaded figure. The mistress at Shenton cannot have been too bad (or too good!) because I cannot remember a thing about her. Certainly, I was not miserable there. My main memory is that we wrote on slates, using pencils made of slate, and a squeaky business it was: you could have heard us writing from 50 paces.

When I was about seven, I was transferred to the elementary school at Market Bosworth and, again, I do not think it was particularly bad. The teaching, however, was not good; we learnt everything by rote. Dates in history and multiplication tables are examples of what was stuffed into our unreceptive minds. All sporting activity was a result of our own efforts; no equipment or coaching was provided.

I won the Dixie scholarship to the grammar school and, there, I came up against the unpleasant realities of life. It was frightful -- with the emphasis on fright.

The head master, Ford-Smith, must have been an exceptionally kind man -- how else could he have been so helpful to Ted? -- but he was terrifying to the pupils. A triple Oxford blue, he looked, to us, to be about the size of an overgrown giant. In moments of anger, he let his canine teeth protrude outside his bottom lip; and he foamed at the mouth when he really got going. A story which we believed completely was: that he had been operated on for appendicitis (this op. had only recently been developed, and was made popular by Edward VII) and they had left a bit of surgical equipment inside him. We were not clear about what had been left -- stories varied from pairs of forceps to rolls of cotton wool -- but it was believed to cause intense pain and the pain led to ungovernable temper.

His three sons attended the school and two of them, the oldest and youngest, were decently apologetic about and afraid of their father. For some reason, we all distrusted the middle one.

Much more than half the pupils were boarders and they seemed to come from homes in which there was a lot more money than the day boys' parents could muster. This could have led to a difficult situation in the social structure of the pupil society but I cannot remember any sign of such a problem. Perhaps we were all so solidly scared of the man up top that we stood shoulder to shoulder.

Against all the evidence, we were convinced we were at a public school. In any case, we were certain we were a cut above all neighbouring schools and, later, some support appeared for this apparently fatuous belief. There was a huge iron bound chest, on which we stood to pin notices on the games board. It was heavily padlocked and the governors refused to let Ford-Smith open it. The next head did not ask permission: he told the blacksmith to open it. I was out of the country when this happened but the contents of the chest provoked a lot of attention from historians.

Briefly, the chest contained minutes of the governors' meetings, going back to the eleventh century; the school was functioning before 1094AD. Minutes dealing with meetings when Samuel Johnson was an usher at the school had been removed. Unfortunately, the governors had been a litigious lot and, even after centuries of

litigation, they did not realise that only lawyers do well out of the law. The Bosworth Story (1967) by Bernard Newman (an old boy), published by Herbert Jenkins, 2 Clements Inn, London, gives a detailed account of the school's decline.

How our belief in the virtues of the school was passed down, I do not know but, without anybody saying a word to us, we all realised that we were something special. Possibly, just knowing the school was functioning when the battle of Bosworth was being fought outside its doors in 1485 was sufficient to boost our impressionable little egos.

The buildings were reasonably impressive. The main entrance door was Norman, made of oak, studded with iron nails which must have weighed a pound apiece, and the whole door probably weighed upwards of a ton. Flagged floors and stone staircase had all been worn by our predecessors so much that they made unseemly haste a bit dangerous. From the look of it, the fives court was built right after the game was invented. The gymnasium was adequate as a building but the equipment was in a sorry state. Science laboratories were above the gym.

Mounting steps, for use by the boys who came on horseback, were still there; as was the horse trough referred to by Mother.

A building of which we were proud was the 'sloyd'. I have just looked it up and find it comes from a Swedish word meaning 'dexterity' and refers to a system of manual training by teaching woodwork. From this, I deduce that some governor during the previous 50 years or so must have had a few modern ideas. The result of his vision, to us, was one period each week with a man called Bridges; he was a good carpenter, but no teacher, and I doubt if many of us developed much dexterity under his teaching.

The playing field was good and about half a mile from the buildings. We had to play team games and real commitment was required -- or else! The only thing I had any talent for was hockey and I was content with this because, with judicious management and a fair dose of cowardice (of which I always had lots), the chances of getting covered with mud were small. When we had played a match, we had to have tea (very frugal, this) with the visiting team. When we played away, we always had the luxury of a communal hot bath but, to our aggressively well concealed shame, our school had no such luxury. After getting soaked with sweat, often supplemented by rain while playing a hard match, running back to school, donning cold clothes over cold sweat, and eating a sandwich, the 2½ mile walk home on a winter evening could make us feel a bit sorry for ourselves.

Teaching varied immensely. The head took us for latin, which meant that we all worked hard at it. However hard we tried, though, Ford-Smith could always catch us out and this would throw him into paroxysms of rage. Looking back, it seems he was almost like a man on drugs, but he got his fixes by losing his temper. He still baffles me but there can be no argument about one thing: he could reduce every member of his class to a state of abject terror.

A chap named Haythorne taught French to us. He had been commissioned in the infantry during World War I and I suspect he claimed to have picked up a bit of French during his sojourn in the trenches. We learnt hundreds of irregular verbs and idioms but we never spoke French.

History was merely an exercise in memory. Geography was nearly as bad but, about a year before I left, a man named Blount who was a recent graduate from Oxford arrived and he made the subject come alive. I wish he had come earlier. Highton,

who taught Maths, was enthusiastic about teaching those who wanted to learn but he seemed to have developed a live and let live attitude to those of us who were not so keen.

Discipline was strict and extended to everywhere. If any member of the public complained about our behaviour, the pupil's story was never given the benefit of the doubt. Punishment was caning on the hands by the head master, and rarely did he fail to draw blood. I had it five times and it was quite something though, oddly, few boys cried during the ordeal.

Ted was the only member of our family who got his name on the honours board; he won an open exhibition to London University.

My feelings when Mother agreed to let me go to Canada in March 1928 included no regret about having to leave school. I hated it.

CHAPTER 10WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FAMILY

It might be interesting to find out what happened to the Shenton family after its poverty-stricken childhood.

All of us had always hoped to emigrate but I think this was more of a childish ambition than a wish based on careful reasoning. Certainly if we had stayed in England, our prospects would have been poor. Sober assessment of my siblings leads me to believe that only three of us could possibly have succeeded in the academic world; four would have had to do more practical jobs and the only thing we knew was farming.

In those days, farmers took what they called 'farm pupils' on to the staff and the four of us could undoubtedly have secured such jobs. In fact, the pupil was merely a labourer who was paid a lower wage but allowed to eat at the master's table; we would have opted for labouring. But what then?

We had no money and farming was going through a dreadful depression. The odds on us spending the rest of our lives as labourers were high, but emigration offered a glimmer of hope. And we had it on the authority of The Boys' Own Paper, J Fenimore Cooper, R.M. Ballantyne and other authors that life abroad was filled with danger and excitement.

Ted was the only one who did not emigrate, and this was almost certainly because of his physical defects. With a fit body, he would have been outstandingly well suited to the adventurous overseas life which was possible in those days.

Following, are thumbnail sketches of our lives, in descending order of age. John Hudson kindly wrote the bits about Ted and Gretta; he was closely associated with Ted while I was abroad, and he was married to Gretta.

IVOR OLIVER

Ivor was not closely associated with our life at Shenton. By the time we settled there, he was old enough to work and so contribute to the family income. He became a farm pupil with Uncle Ivor, who farmed at Fenny Drayton, 4 miles away. He came home at least once a week and I remember he was good natured about playing with me, and he had a trilby hat. In 1919, he emigrated to Australia and, the night before he left, I remember he broke down when he and I were alone together. We were heartbroken and cried our eyes out.

Three years later, he went on to New Zealand, where he farmed. He married Ada and, in 1929, Beryl was born. They seem to have been happy and they made enough money.

One of the great moments of my life was during 1961, when Effie and I were spending a couple of months with Alec on the prairie. Alec and I met Ivor off a train in Regina during the middle of the night. We were together for a few weeks and it was obvious that he was very proud of Ada and Beryl.

His letters to me after Ada died were full of praise for Beryl and he thought Beryl and her husband, Bill, were wonderfully wise in taking the fruit farm at Keri Keri. Always, when he had been to visit them, he was ecstatic about the beauty of the place; so he and Sir Charles Darwin had at least one taste in common.

ALAN BUCKLER

If I were asked to say who was the best natured of us, I would have to nominate Alan. Even as a kid, he exuded good nature and he never managed to get rid of it. I think he went to work for Mr Fox, Hall Farm, Heather, as soon as he left school, in about 1916. He fell for Alcie, the daughter, in a big way, and stayed with them until he and Alec went to Canada in 1923. I think it was longing for Alcie which made him return in 1925; he seemed to have liked Canada well enough. He managed Hall Farm and married Alcie in about 1928.

After Peggy was born, they moved to a smaller farm at Edmundthorpe, near Melton Mowbray, and his next two children were born there. He worked very hard but circumstances, especially the depression, and his good nature, were too much for him. I used to spend my holidays from University with him and I did work hard but he always tried to pay me generously when, in fact, I was grateful to have been on the farm. But this was always his Achilles heel and, in 1939 he sold up and took the family to New Zealand, where he farmed until he died in 1965.

ALEC JOSIAH

I suppose we all differed from each other but, in retrospect, Alec seems to have been especially different. For one thing, he was a terrifying fighter and would probably have gone to the top if he had entered the world of boxing. He was exceptionally strong, both in physique and will. I, who probably knew him better than anyone else, always had a queer idea that an exceptionally super fellow was trying to break out of him; but he always succeeded in keeping it inside.

The Canadian prairie suited him beautifully. It was hard, but so was he and, after bad crops ended in 1936, he forged ahead. He married Gladys Guest (Griff's wife's sister) in 1936 but they had no children. When we stayed with him in 1961, he was enormously wealthy and made it plain that he would never retire. He died suddenly in 1971.

He had never had a holiday.

WILLIAM EDWARD

Ted was born at Grange Farm, Higham on the Hill in 1906. He went to the local elementary school and then to Dixie Grammar School, Market Bosworth.

In about 1920, he nearly succumbed to a severe attack of poliomyelitis that left him paralysed but not demoralised. After a year in Leicester Royal Infirmary, he gradually recovered some use of his legs and was able to walk with a stick, though he was heavily handicapped in his walking for the rest of his life, and had to wear a calliper on one leg.

Thanks to help from the Dixie head master, his Mother's relentless battling on his behalf, and his own determination and intelligence, he was able to study at Loughborough College and the Midland Agricultural College (MAC), qualifying with a National Diploma in Agriculture and a London external BSc; he was the first MAC student to gain both awards. He was appointed to the Agricultural Economics Department at MAC in 1930. From there to the Agricultural Department of the Scottish Office in Edinburgh (c.1934 to c.1947) and then as Reader and Head of Department of Agricultural Economics in the MAC -- which had just become the School of Agriculture of the University of Nottingham.

Ted quickly made a name for himself as a hard worker, thinker, administrator and committee man, able to fight his corner against the powers of organised agriculture in a way which was admired by his colleagues in the civil service. His work involved much travel, especially during the war, when he represented Scottish interests on national committees concerned with food production. Attendance at meetings in Whitehall involved rail sleepers over two consecutive nights, and must have been a great strain.

Under Ted's leadership, the Department soon began to flourish and he would have built up a first-rate unit had he not died in 1951. His early death may have been associated with his gruelling work load and the strain of his physical handicap. Also, shortly before his death, he returned from a 6 month working tour of USA.

In 1933, Ted married Mollie Stanger, who had been a fellow student at MAC. They had four children. When they moved from Edinburgh, they lived for a few years in Nottingham, to be near a good school, but Ted bought The White House at Thulston in 1951, looking forward to developing a gracious home and garden. He died shortly after.

GRIFFITH

Griff left school and worked for Alan at Hall Farm for a year or so but this arrangement did not work well. Long after Alan and Griff were dead, Alcie (who had, to my knowledge, never said an unkind word about anybody) stayed with us in Buckingham for a few weeks and she was obviously bitter about Griff; he had used his privileged position as the boss's brother to undermine Alan's authority.

He went to Canada in about 1926. In 1928 he got his own farm and he had the makings of a good farmer but the drought and the awful depression made it difficult to be successful. Sometime during the 1930s, he got a job as a salesman but I cannot remember -- probably never knew -- what he sold. It was said, probably correctly, that he was good at selling things. He had the loudest and most carrying voice I have ever heard.

In 1928, he married May Guest but they had no family, so they adopted a boy. Griff died suddenly in 1961, just before Effie and I got to the prairie.

MARY GRETTA

Gretta was born at Westfields in 1910 and most of her childhood was spent in Shenton. She attended a small private school in a nearby village; after winning a scholarship, she attended Nuneaton High School until she was eighteen.

As a prelude to a career in dairying, she did a spell of practical work on a Cornish farm, followed by a county council course in which she came top of her group. After a tough year in charge of a pasteurising unit near Matlock, through one of the coldest winters ever, she ran the private dairy of the Earl of Stair at Lochinch for two years. Whilst there, she was awarded a county council bursary to MAC, where Ted had studied.

College life, from 1931 to 1933, seems to have suited her: she made several lifelong friends and gained the college Diploma in Dairying, as well as the National Diploma (the only woman in her year to get both). She became a dairy chemist in United Dairy's factory at Bason Bridge in Somerset.

In 1936, she married John Hudson, who had been a horticultural student at MAC from 1927 to 1930, and good friends with Ted, through whom they met. From 1935, John had been a lecturer at Plumpton School of Agriculture; he rented a 400 year old cottage nearby and he and Gretta lived there until 1939. John Colin was born in 1938 followed by Richard Anthony in 1939, by which time John had been called up to his territorial unit on the outbreak of war. After being there for the birth, Mrs Heath took Gretta and the boys to live with her in Yeovil.

For the rest of the war, Gretta lived for some months in Edinburgh, then in a rented house in Chapel en le Frith, where John's people lived and, finally, for 2 years in Burgess Hill, Sussex, to be near John's job when he returned from war. Her Mother shared Gretta's homes throughout the war but she died in 1945, just as John, released from the army in April, was offered a post in the Department of Agriculture, New Zealand. The family returned to UK in 1948, when John took a lectureship at MAC. They had a college house for a few years, then built Northacre, East Leake, where they lived from 1956 to 1967.

John was finally appointed Director of Long Ashton Research Station from 1967 to 1975. For the first 2 years, they lived in a house on the station, then moved to Wrington, where Gretta spent the last 20 years of her life, seeing the garden they had made, and the trees they had planted, grow to maturity.

Gretta had her share of the Heath heart problems. She had three coronaries, in 1977, 1982 and 1985, and a massive stroke in 1985 left her partially paralysed and almost bereft of speech. Despite these handicaps, she and John worked out an acceptable lifestyle, based on Gretta's courage, fortitude and philosophical attitude towards her problems. After 3½ tranquil years at home, she had another stroke and died a few weeks later.

GEORGE BRYAN STEPHENS

Family tradition has it that the 'Stephens' was added because Grandfather Heath promised to "see him all right" in his will if the family name were included. If this were true, grandfather reneged.

I emigrated to join Alec and Griff in March 1928, when I was 15½ years old and, beginning when I was 16 years and 2 months old, spent 6 months alone in a shack during the prairie winter. It was a bit of an ordeal and I think it affected my character -- permanently.

I divided my time between Saskatchewan and British Columbia until, in 1936, I returned to Britain to spend 5 years in the Veterinary School in Edinburgh. General practice turned out to be a flop: I became allergic to cattle! The rest of my working life was spent in pathology, with a spell of nearly 2 years in Peru, working for the United Nations.

I married Effie Wilson in 1942. We had four children and were, and are, happy.

MOTHER'S GRANDCHILDREN

Mother's children produced 16 grandchildren for her: Beryl (Ivor); Peggy, Hazel, Tom, Malcolm, Robert (Alan); David, Edward, Barbara, Philip (Ted); Colin, Dick (Gretta); Michael, John, Elizabeth and Marjorie (Bryan).

CHAPTER 11JOURNEY TO THE PRAIRIE

On 16 March 1928, I sailed for Canada on the Canadian Pacific Railroad SS Montrose; the trip cost £10, door to door, under the Subsidised Immigration Scheme. For 5 days, I was appallingly sea-sick and that drew my attention to a fact of life which had, previously, escaped my attention: many great moments in the average life may be marred by weakness of the body. Who, for example, had not lost much of what should have been a great experience because s/he had toothache? or was bursting to go to the loo?

The rest of the voyage was a great experience: my huge appetite, set against unlimited good food, ushered in days through which I consistently ate until I was torpid. Life, after all, was good.

We docked at St John, New Brunswick on 31 March. I had never before seen, or felt, such cold and I quickly acquired a bit of knowledge about the dangers associated with low temperature: a steel hawser running across the deck prompted me to touch it, so I could feel just how cold it was. I only put one finger on, but losing the skin from that one was bad enough.

Early next morning, we transferred to a CPR transcontinental train. And there I sat until, 5 days later, we reached Weyburn during the evening. Here, I was faced with a problem. Mother, as she said goodbye to me at Liverpool, had given me £3 to provide for food and spending money for the journey; along with strict instructions to husband it carefully so that, with what was left, Alec could buy a cow. Alec and Griff having no cow was, to Mother, an outrageous state of affairs.

My £3 had been worth 15 dollars, which sounds good; but I had not been the best of shoppers and, every time the train had stopped, I had got off and bought "a peesa pie an' a cuppa cawfee". Their apple pie was scrumptious but my licentious living had made my capital dwindle to a dollar and very few cents. Weyburn was a typical little prairie town: all false fronts and board sidewalks, hidden under a waste of snow. I had no idea how much a night in an hotel would cost and it was cold that drove me into the only hotel I could see: a small featureless wooden shanty supporting a big wooden board on which was painted a shaky 'Hotel'. A big Chinaman greeted me from the gloom inside: “Wot chew wantee, boy?" To my reply, he said "One dollar" and, after he had taken the money from me, he led me to the barest little cubby hole you could imagine. However, he gave me a good breakfast next morning and I caught a train for the last 38 miles.

The conductor (guard) of the train had treated me as dirt beneath his feet but, when we got to Pangman, he led me along to the station agent and told him to "Look after this young man; he's come all the way from England". The agent did not seem overjoyed at the news so I sat by myself until the postmaster, a gloomy and taciturn man, stopped in front of me, took off his right mitt and, without saying a word, shook hands. Then, still without a word being said, I picked up my bag, followed him to the platform and helped him push a handcart piled high with mail to the post office. The whole town was gathered there and I sat while my silent friend sorted and handed out the mail. At some stage, the postmaster gave me an apple -- still without saying a word. Later, I got to know him well but, to the end, he remained the mutest man I ever knew.

After an hour or so, a rather jolly man, Charlie White, turned up in a motor car fitted with tyre chains -- things I had never seen or heard of before. He took me 4 miles to

his home, where we had lunch (called 'dinner'). Later, Alec and Griff turned up in a sleigh, pulled by a spanking team of horses.

We set off on a 4 mile journey over the snow and, after a bit, we came over a rise and Alec said, in a voice fairly oozing with pride, "Well, there she is". Nearly a mile away, there were two structures which I instantly thought of as wooden hen houses, but realised they must be the farm buildings. And so they were.

When we arrived at what I was to learn to call home, we unhitched the horses and put them into the much bigger of the two buildings. Then, into the shack, which was 16' x 16' and, piled high against the walls outside to keep it warm inside, was farmyard muck, though this was now covered by snow. Inside, as well as the room downstairs, there was a primitive staircase to the space left under a high pitched roof. In the middle of the floor was a trapdoor, from which you could drop through a hole in the floor into an unwalled excavation which we, rather grandly, called the cellar. This cellar proved to be a constant source of trouble because the walls were not faced with concrete or similar material and would periodically cave in.

Heat was provided by a primitive stove, with a tin chimney in which was set a Dutch oven -- a thing like a horizontal, double walled 5 gallon oil drum around which the smoke and heat flowed.

Griff had been elected, with no opposition whatever, as cook and supper (the evening meal) made me realise that the prairie was no place for an epicure. There were only two items of food: boiled home-cured bacon which was so salty it almost defeated me; and bread which I considered to be inedible. During the meal, though, Alec startled me by heartily congratulating Griff on the quality of that week's bread. He was obviously sincere and Griff squirmed with pleasure at the praise. It made me think a bit!

Towards the end of supper, Griff poured himself a big mug of hot tea and took from a pile of assorted clothes a greyish strip of cloth which he ironed with the bottom of the hot mug. It turned out that he had arranged to visit May Guest, the girl he later married and, naturally, he wanted to look as smart as possible. The cloth was his shirt collar, which he claimed to have washed. Later that evening, though, I thought he looked far from being a lady killer as he got on his horse and rode off on his 4 mile journey into the night.

The abrupt transition from a poverty-stricken existence in England, where food and amenities were good, to an even more destitute existence in Saskatchewan, where amenities did not even pretend to exist, must have been a bit of a shock, but I cannot remember noticing it at the time. I suppose the resilience of the young helped me to accept the change. But the food was terrible -- even after I had to take over the cooking.

CHAPTER 12THE SUMMER TREADMILL

My arrival on the prairie was just early enough for me to experience the wonders of a prairie spring. Winter was still firmly in place when I got there on 5 April, and the end of a prairie winter is a dreary looking affair: the snow is dirty and has largely consolidated to ice but, when spring comes, the change is rapid and magnificent. It is associated with a beautifully soft wind, called by the Indians a 'chinook'.

Late at night a week or so after I had arrived, Alec and Griff got very excited about a noise I had never heard before; it was geese, flying through the night, high above the shack. We always called them geese but I now understand most of them were sand cranes from the deep south of USA. It seemed odd that they came over during both day and night and, always when I saw them, they were airborne. I wonder when they rested? Every year, this migration was quickly followed by the chinook. Fluctuations of-temperature, at any time of the year, could be sudden, massive and dangerous. In spring, although the temperature did not always seem to rise much, the snow became rotten and quickly disappeared and, wonder of wonders, the prairie for a few days was covered thickly with crocuses; at least, they looked like crocuses.

Snow water ran into the depressions of the prairie (which was very rolling where we were) to form sloughs (pronounced 'slews') which could be anything from 100 to 500 yards wide, and many of them survived the summer in normal years.

Arrival of Spring meant the beginning of a Summer of appallingly hard work for us. The season was so short that we had to hurry: our survival depended on the summer's work.

Griff had decided to rent our nearest neighbour's place and get married, so Alec and I were left alone. Farming was simple: land was divided into three parts for a rotation of: leave fallow; crop last year's fallow; and crop the stubble of last year's crop. This was fine for those with established farms but a lot of our land was virgin prairie. Stones, ranging from football size to boulders of several tons, had to be dug out and hauled to rock piles which were generally built on the edge of sloughs. Many of the rocks contained breathtakingly beautiful fossils -- most of them, apparently, from sea animals; ammonites were fairly common. Also, we found whole villages of teepee rings, from where the Indians (who had left only a few years previously) had used rocks to hold down the skins which, over poles, formed-the walls of their teepees (wigwams). Vandals that we were, we chucked the whole lot into the rock piles.

After this, we ploughed the virgin prairie deeply, with a sulky plough. 'Sulky', for some reason, was the word we used to describe a one furrow plough or a buggy pulled by one horse. These breaking ploughs were pulled by two teams of two horses, hitched in tandem and I think we all disliked the job. However careful we were about digging out the rocks, some were always overlooked. The horses moved at a speed of less than 2 mph but the inertia was such that, when the point of a share hit and hooked on to a rock, the plough pivoted on the share point and the chap on the seat was catapulted on to the rear team's backside. Often, the horses retaliated by kicking us and, in any case, we took some terrible bumps on the plough frame.

To sow grain, we prepared the ground by eight-horse outfits pulling disc harrows or disc plough, both of which had a seat for the driver to ride. Then drag harrows pulled by eight horses but having no seat. We drilled the seed with smallish drills pulled by four horses.

Almost every year, we had rain in late June to early July. It was not big or hard, probably only a few inches, but this rain would give us a crop. Without the rain, we got a crop failure.

By the time we had sown the crop, we had to start cultivating fallow land and breaking virgin prairie. Rock digging and picking was an endless job and popular opinion was that the rocks grew, just as weeds do. We also had to harvest the hay crop which appeared as the sloughs dried up. This hay came from a rather wonderful grass which we called 'prairie wool'. It grew at the edges of and on dried up sloughs and appeared to be very nutritious to stock. Mixed in with some areas of it was what we called spear grass; its seeds were spindle-shaped, had a barb on one end and a tough wiry stem on the other. If you put a seed on your hand and spat on it, the stem would instantly turn into a corkscrew and this would rotate the seed -- barb downwards. When we got seeds next to our skin, they would penetrate and the barbs made them difficult to remove. Also, they caused damage to stock.

Winter offered endless opportunities to be lazy but Summer was just a great pain of interminable work. We got up at 5 am, climbed on a horse and collected the horses we needed into the barn. We then fed, groomed and harnessed them. Grooming took longer than you would think because, if we did not spend enough time on their shoulders, sores developed. Towards the end of this job, I had to nip into the shack and make breakfast; and this was not easy. I had to make a fire in the stove from the irreducible minimum of kindling (no trees on the prairie), fry bacon and, if the hens had played the game, eggs, and make porridge and tea. As the years went on, I learnt a few tricks to speed things up a bit: for example, I used to make a huge preserving pan full of porridge while I baked the bread on Sundays. At breakfast during the next week, I simply cut thick slices off the cold porridge and fried it with the bacon. It was quite good; well, sort of; if you really were hungry.

After a quick breakfast, we each took an outfit to the field and hitched it to the implement we were to use. The prairie had all been divided by surveyors into mile square plots (sections), with road allowances in between. Because the earth is a sphere or, as a purist would say, an oblate spheroid, squares cannot be laid out on its surface so, every 36 miles north and south, they inserted a correction line and started again. Each corner of a section was marked by a hole, several feet across. A quarter section (160 acres) was a square plot with ½ mile sides. We aimed to cover the ½ mile in 25 minutes, after which we gave the outfit a 5 minute breather. So our two 5 hour spells (7 am to noon and 1 pm to 6 pm) entailed covering 20 miles each day. Even with implements which had seats, this made hard going but, presumably because I was the youngest, I tended to do all the harrowing and had a 20 mile walk added on to all the rest.

Temperatures were high in summer: they regularly topped 100°F and this heat, along with the work and perpetual wind made us pretty tired. Also, we got covered with dust (blown soil) which, combined with our primitive washing facilities, did not increase out feeling of well-being.

Dinner had to be pushed down in a hurry. After unbridling, watering and feeding eight horses, there was not much time left for cooking and eating if we were to be back on the job by 1 pm. And, if we were late, it meant we could not quit at 6 pm, which was a serious blow to our spare time.

After unharnessing and feeding the horses at 6 pm we ate supper and sat around for a bit while the horses finished feeding, then turned them out to a corral (ours was an enclosure of about 100 acres) for the night. If we had the energy, we would build a few fires of wet hay (smudges) and the horses would stick their heads into the

abundant thick smoke so they could get a short break from the mosquitoes. The fly problem was terrible. When evening approached, what looked like a column of smoke appeared above every animal, including humans, outside. Each column was made up of tens of thousands of mosquitoes and, during my first two summers, grotesque swellings used to appear on my face. Most humans stop reacting to them after a couple of years but, until this happens, mosquitoes pose a bit of a problem.

House flies, also, were awful. If we'd had even a smattering of knowledge about entomology, I am sure we could easily have coped with this problem but we were ignorant and went out of our way to provide the flies with breeding places. When we finished breakfast, we turned our cups upside down on our upside down plates. By dinner time, these turned up surfaces would be a solid brownish black with flies' regurgitations and excretions so, before tackling a cup of tea, we used our thumbs to wipe a half moon free of fly dirt, and thus we avoided sullying our lips with -filth: hygienic to the point of being old women, we were! Plates were turned up and emptied quickly. This process was repeated at supper time, after which I washed the crockery -- unless I was too tired.

When the crop was safely sown, we would take half a day off to sow and plant a garden; in the middle of the wheat crop because we believed the gophers (prairie dogs) might not find it there. Growth in these gardens was prodigious. Lettuce and so forth were ready to pick just a few weeks after they had been sown and all the pumpkins, squash and sweet corn made the fall (autumn) perfect -- in 1928. During the dry years, gardens almost disappeared.

As if we had not got enough to do, roads had to be built throughout the community. ‘Throughout the community' could be loosely interpreted as meaning from the town to all local councillors' farms. We may have been primitive but not many people could teach us much about corruption in local government. In those days, we were not in on the act but, when I visited Alec in 1961, he was a leading light on the council and had even developed sufficient effrontery to tell me how he and his buddies on the council sacrificed themselves to help the community. My heart bled for their self sacrifice.

Where the roads went did not matter to us; the council was willing to pay us to do the work, so we turned up with 4-horse outfits and worked hard. New roads, we made by building grades through sloughs and by cutting pieces out of hills. With our fresnoes and dumpers (implements which, when the handles were slightly raised, dug into and collected about a ton of soil; they emptied when the handles were raised again) we were the poor man's version of the bull dozer or, as they seem to be called now, JCB.

The roads were made of soil and, in wet weather, developed ruts. And we were always ready, for a price, with a 4-horse outfit to correct this condition by pulling scrapers along the affected bits.

The week's relaxation came on Saturday night. We quit work at 6 pm and did the usual chores. By about 9 pm, we had washed our faces, combed our hair and set off to town. We preferred to ride but, generally, we had too much to carry into or home from town, so we hitched a team to a buggy. Pangman, our local metropolis, was probably about right for us. There was no honkeytonk or, indeed, any other form of vice there; at least, we never managed to find any. We collected our mail from the post office; a pool hall did reasonably well but we could not afford to play, though we were friendly with the owner; the machinery shop and harness shops, naturally, did not keep busy all the time; the blacksmith, Phil Izaac was small but enormously strong, worked very hard, had so many kids that he barely knew most of them, and always forgot who owed money to him. We all tried to be honest with him because,

had he gone out of business, I think we would have had to quit farming. Sulky ploughs, for example, regularly had to have pieces of iron welded on to their shares. He was a good man, was Phil. The only other tradesman was the one who meant most to us, and heaven knows how much cash the community owed him. We paid his bills only after the crop had been harvested each year. He was a roly poly man, as bald as an egg and we all liked him. His name was Harold Andrews.

Almost all our needs were supplied from Harold's store, and he could supply anything. Shopping was a slow business, preceded by long discussions, which might cover the state of the crops, who had been to the doctor, who would win the World Series (baseball) and how much water was showing in Art Sample's new well. Our orders were confined almost entirely to staples bought in big lots: 100 lb bags of flour, sugar, rice and similar items were always needed.

All these exciting things were supplemented by sitting on the sidewalk and talking to other farmers. It seemed normal at the time but would have looked odd to the folks back home: whenever we met, if we were on foot, we instantly sat down to talk -- generally on the ground -- wherever we were. I think it may have been because we were so physically tired.

When we were sated with the pleasures of city life, we went home, generally getting there at about 3 am or later. Sleeping was no problem, even on week days, so you can imagine our sleeps on Saturday nights. One Saturday night, Hank Webb came back from town with me and, when we got to the shack, Alec and Reg Merris (from Redditch, England) had returned before us and were fast asleep. I cannot remember which of us suggested it but Hank and I shoved a cartridge up the spout of a 12 bore and, standing in the middle of the room, shot through the open door. Neither Alec nor Reg even caught his breath and, next morning, would not believe it had happened.

Jimmy McNichol once slept until Monday and went to town the following Sunday.

The above account of farming holds good only for 1928; after that, things changed.

CHAPTER 13THE REWARD FOR OUR WORK

Harvest marked the climax of our year. But, even in good crop years, there were frequent tragedies and many farmers suffered heartbreaking disappointments. The most common thing which could go wrong was caused by hailstorms: sometimes just a day or so before harvest was to begin, a fine crop might be destroyed by a few minutes' hail. The hail often fell in huge chunks of ice and it was quite dangerous to anybody caught outside.

When the crop was ready, we bindered it and stooked it. A few entrepreneurs in the district had bought separators (threshing machines) and farmers who hired these machines made up the gangs which worked them. After hiring a separator and the man who owned and ran it, we had to take our place in the queue but we acted as part of the gang which did the work on all farms which had hired the machine. Our wages were deducted from the price we paid for the separator. We slept in a caboose, which was trailed from farm to farm. The farm at which we were threshing fed us. If any women were in the kitchen, they always rose to the occasion magnificently and provided fabulous amounts of scrumptious food.

Generally, the separator was set in the middle of a quarter section (½ mile square) and, by the time the tractor had lined it up with the wind and started it working, one or other of us would have a load ready to chuck into its jaws. We drove the load alongside a fast moving conveyor belt and tossed the bundles in so they met the cylinder head on. The cylinder beat the straw into short lengths and knocked the wheat out. After all the grain had been shaken out and taken by an Archimedes screw into a granary placed alongside the separator, the straw was blown by a big cyclone fan up a long pipe, pointed upward at an angle which could be varied according to need. The thick (about 9 inches wide) stream of chopped straw fell to form a huge pile on the ground.

When we finished threshing, there was a great high pile of straw on most quarter sections. We turned most of the stock out to fend for themselves during the winter and groups of them would live in fair harmony at and in these straw piles. We burnt the piles next spring.

In Starling's Physiology, the standard textbook for medical and vet students during the 1930s, workers on these prairie threshing gangs were alleged to use as many or more calories than any other group of workers; I believe this was probably true. A standard day involved hauling 13 loads that each contained more than 300 bundles. In the 1928 crop, each bundle yielded about half a bushel (32 lb) of wheat, so that, at a conservative estimate, every day, each man pitched 125,000 lb high on to his rack (wagon) and then into the separator. That adds up to quite a bit of horsepower and it's no wonder that, at each meal, we ate with single-minded determination and in almost complete silence for nearly an hour. I shall never know how those wonderful women coped, but they always provided fabulous food in enormous quantities. I take this opportunity of paying tribute to them.

After threshing finished, the grain had to be hauled, 60 bushels at a time, the 8 miles into Pangman. Using buckets as scoops, we had to pitch the 3,740 lb of wheat into a box (wagon) before we hitched up the horses -- four of them in tandem teams. This meant we started the long, slow haul while we were in a muck sweat and, in cold wind, this could be miserable.

When winter was well established, we killed and dressed a steer and two pigs. We cut quite a bit of the meat into cubes and put it into sealers (Kilner jars). The full jar had

water filled to the top, pepper and salt added, it was boiled for 4 hours then we fastened the clip, shoved it in the cellar and hoped for the best. A few went bad and explosions occurred but the meat was wonderful. A 2 lb jar of this, with 12 eggs stirred in as I fried it did away with the need for afters for the two of us. The rest of the meat went into granaries, where it froze hard. I used to saw off big joints but I never did manage to make good gravy. An untimely thaw spelt tragedy for the meat supply. We cured our own bacon and hams, but the results were no great credit to us.

Harvest time on the prairie, in fact the whole fall, was an experience I would not have missed for anything -- in 1928. The sight of miles and miles of tall wheat with heads hanging heavy is a wonderful thing. Harvesting was hard work but the weather was superb: long, still, hot days and very cold nights take a bit of beating. Also, all but the unfortunate ones were getting lots of money, so the community was happy. I cannot adequately describe it, but I have never felt so close to the earth as I did during the fall of 1928.

CHAPTER 14SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

Charlie White took his family to England for the winter of 1928/29 and Alec moved into his home to do his chores. This left me in the shack to face the winter alone; coward that I was, I did not fancy the prospect. I had heard about the cold but the reality startled me. And bad blizzards could be terrifying.

It is difficult now to remember what was worst about that winter, but keeping thawed out must have been close to the top of the list of bad things. Picture the shack, in which a 16 year old coward wakes to face yet another day. He puts his head out of the bedclothes and marvels at the long cone of thick hoar frost on top of the top blanket, caused by condensation of his breath during the night. Both sash windows, although they have storm windows on the outside, are obliterated by ice -- probably up to an inch thick. The walls glisten with ice and the stove is in the same state. On a soap box in the corner, is a bucket of solid ice.

By this time, he feels (because he cannot feel it!) that his nose is freezing so he gives it a quick rub then, shaking like an acute case of malaria, he climbs out of bed, clad in the combination vest and long johns and socks in which he slept, and begins an incredible dressing process, after using a primitive facility for his bodily needs. In the following order, over his night attire, he dons: a fleece-lined combination suit of heavy vest material, a heavy shirt (really thick blanket cloth, this one), great heavy socks, a pair of heavy moleskin trousers and, over everything else, a thick boiler suit. When he has put on his heavy felt boots, he is dressed to face the indoor climate and can have a crack at lighting the fire in the stove.

However hard I tried, breakfast was always unappetising and, after this, I put on rubber overshoes, a heavy cap with fur-lined ear flaps, a mackinaw (sheepskin coat with sheepskin collar) and really heavy fur-lined mitts. I was now ready to see how the stock had fared. I only had Maud, my saddle horse, and a small flock of poultry to look after; all the rest of the stock, pigs and everything, were at the straw piles and looked after themselves.

The poultry were a sad case and quite a few had one or both feet frozen off before spring returned. This always happened and it was odd to see how well they managed, despite the lack of legs.

When blizzards were blowing, it could be difficult to get to the barn, and then I had to water the pony at a well which was 60 to 70 yards away. I gradually realised that Maud was better than I was at finding the well. The water surface was about 12 feet down and keeping a hole in the ice became a problem. I became wonderfully expert at dropping the bucket, attached to a rope, down and through the hole. As I poured water into the depression I had chopped (with an axe) in the solid ice in the drinking trough, Maud drank it as fast as she could; she knew as well as I did that it would be frozen within a few seconds. Stock at the straw pile, and hens, got water by eating snow. For my own drinking water, I sawed snow in blocks from a bank and melted it.

The winter was not all bad. Ever since I had helped the gamekeeper with his trapping, I had longed to run a trapline and, left alone in the shack, I had my chance. Almost immediately, a chance in a million came off: I trapped a huge mink, 36 inches from nose to tail. Where he came from, I do not know; there were no mink in the area in those days, though I believe they are common now. Hudson's Bay confirmed that it was a mink when I sold the pelt, but I had set the trap to catch an ermine (which we called weasels, though they were like white, well nourished stoats). Lots of ermine

and musk rats (musquash), the mink and a coyote gave me a nice little sum of money, which was immediately swallowed by the farm.

This mink was one of three odd bits of wildlife I came across on the prairie. Early one morning, I was disc-harrowing stubble and, from about 50 yards ahead of the outfit, what looked like a golden eagle got up and flew lazily away. I expect it was one of the big American eagles, but why had it come up to us? Or it could have come from the Rockies. The third thing was the strangest of all and occurred while I was riding along a steep hillside: an enormous sea bird glided slowly and closely (say, 5 yards away) past me on motionless wings. I was, and am, pretty sure that it was an albatross. But what was it doing, 2,000 miles inland, 1,000 miles from the Lakes and about 8,000 miles from its usual habitat? And what did it eat? These two sightings were so bizarre that I never told anybody about them.

In spells of good weather, I was able to relieve the monotony by riding 8 miles into Pangman for the mail. But the weather could change fantastically quickly. When we saw Alec in 1961, he told me he had once seen the temperature drop 84°F in 30 minutes and, from my experience, I could easily believe this.

I put in a lot of thought about how to keep the shack warm but the only thing I came up with was adding more muck to that piled against the outside walls. Maud and I collaborated well on this project and, by the time spring came, I reckoned I was the only Dixie scholar living in a muck pile; well, I hadn't much else to boast about! But, with the outside temperature ranging from 10 to 60°F below zero, and the ever--present danger of down to 80°F below, keeping warm was not a luxury; you jolly well had to do it.

As well as cold, you can hardly imagine what a problem boredom was. I had probably always been a bit introspective and I now had lots of scope for this. My thinking was wide ranging but I gradually developed a conviction that I was the wickedest fellow on earth; I thought that, if my peers knew what I was really like, I would be a pariah for evermore. This belief stayed with me for several years, until I attended a confession session at a meeting of the Oxford Group. From this, I found I had been no more than an also-ran in the wickedness stakes. It was humiliating but it took away from me an oppressive worry.

It is a pity that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was not in the shack. In it, Huxley writes: "If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoings. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean." This advice would have saved me a deal of worry.

As in all the boys' stories of prisoners, I had my pets to help cheer me up. Throughout my time in Canada, the shack supported a reasonable number of mice and they were a great comfort to me. While I was reading, a few would sit twitching their whiskers and looking at me; this gave me a surprising feeling that I had someone to share my misery.

We had few books in the shack but, perhaps unfortunately, one of them was a Bible. I read it right through, carefully, and found so many things I could not swallow that I abandoned Christianity and I still cannot bring myself to be a Christian; nor would I try to. Years later, I developed my own religion, which I have found satisfying. I think everyone should have a religion but I believe that proselytising is unforgivable. No missionaries will get hand-outs from me.

Perhaps Samuel Butler had similar thoughts when, in The Way of all Flesh, he has one parson say to another: "The Bible is not without value to us, the clergy, but for the laity it is a stumbling block which cannot be taken out of their way too soon or too completely. Of course, I mean on the supposition that they read it which, happily, they seldom do. If people read the bible as the ordinary British churchman or churchwoman reads it, it is harmless enough; but if they read it with any care -- which we should assume they will if we give it them at all -- it is fatal to them."

I got great pleasure from some of the names of biblical characters; who, for example, would not like to be a friend of Nebuchadnezzar, or Hashbadada -- or even Ham?

By the end of the winter, I'd had several bouts of acute depression. They lasted for a few days and, while they were on, I convinced myself that everything I had ever done was wrong and the only decent way out was suicide. These attacks persisted at least until my student days, but they gradually became less of a burden -- probably because experience had shown me that I always got better. While the attacks lasted, I always felt the whole world had begun to turn black -- literally.

The end of winter was welcome that year and I have no desire ever to repeat the experience. My cowardice pulled me through, but a few of my experiences were pretty frightening.

CHAPTER 15THE BAD YEARS

My first year, 1928, was the last proper crop I ever saw. After the June rain that year, we saw not a spot during the next four years and this entirely changed our way of life. Quite early in each year, we would realise that our crop had failed. As well as lack of rain, only small amounts of snow fell during the winters and the spring thaw yielded almost no water for the land, as well as for the sloughs.

As soon as we were convinced of failure, our work became pointless and we at least had enough sense to accept this fact and slack off a bit. You would have thought we would have talked things over, and then widened the discussion by getting the neighbours' views on the situation but I cannot remember that we ever did anything of the sort. I think we would have looked on ourselves as quitters if we had even considered leaving the prairie. Also, I think we were so obsessed by the bumper crop of 1928 that we put all our hopes on getting a similar crop next year; every next year! We were fools, but our loyalty to the prairie could not be questioned.

Rust (a disease) on the wheat followed the drought, thus giving us seven successive crop failures while I was there and, throughout this time, the situation was pretty awful.

The prairie was run entirely on credit. When the crop had been harvested and sold we paid our debts; the tradesmen knew it was no use asking for payment before the crop was sold, because we had no money. Harold Andrews was our biggest supplier and he was happy (or, if he was not happy, he concealed it well) to give us credit until next year's crop. If the crop failed, he extended the credit. But there was a limit which we quickly came up against.

Harold had as much faith in the prairie as we did, but his wholesalers were a bit less gullible. They cut off his credit and, from then on, we could buy almost nothing. We had to pay cash -- but we had no cash.

I said we stopped a lot of the work when the drought came, but there was still enough to stop us from becoming idle. The job which took precedence over everything else was getting enough water to keep the stock, and us, alive. In normal years, stock could always fill up at a slough but the sloughs had, with few exceptions, disappeared. Our only hope was to find wells which were sufficiently productive and we worked really hard at this. After a bit of practice, Alec and I got so muscular and so expert that we could start at 7 am and each dig a 4½ feet diameter circular well 12 feet deep by 6 pm. As well as the hard work, there were four awful things that could happen: some of the cattle were wild with thirst and they well knew what our digging signalled so, either to see how we were getting on or to get an early go at the water, they would stick their heads over the edge and bellow at the same time, thus scaring the pants off me and posing a threat of their falling in; when the end of the day was approaching, we were getting tired and had trouble chucking the wet, sticky spoil clear of the top so it would not fall back on us; climbing out of a well by bracing yourself across it is never easy and, when you’re as tired as we were, it can be nearly impossible; and, worst of all, was to dig a well and get nothing from it.

I never did understand wells; if we dug two wells, 50 yards apart, one might produce a good flow of water for a long time, while the other remained dry.

Stories of the wonderful power of water diviners were plentiful and we discovered the stories were true -- about the willow twig turning down to the earth. When we cut a forked switch from a willow bush beside a slough, if we gripped the forks in a

particular way, the harder we gripped, the more the main stem turned downward. But we could find no relationship between bending of the twig and the presence of water in the ground.

Before the drought, when a well had been dug, a crib (wooden casing) was built and upended into it, to prevent cave-ins. Now, we had no money for wood, so most of us became wonderfully expert at building rock casings inside the wells. They were built on the keystone principle and were wonderfully effective and permanent.

Before the drought, we bought coal at Pangman but lack of money soon put a stop to this sybaritic method of living: we had to drive four horses to the Big Muddy, on the borders of Montana. There, we mined our own soft coal. We could only haul about two tons on each trip and I cannot remember how long a trip took, but it could not have been much less than a week. We had to do a 60 mile journey to get there and this included some cruelly steep hills for the horses and their load to get up on the way home. When nightfall came, we unharnessed and tethered the horses and fed them hay and oats; then we ate a bit of frumety (boiled wheat), lay on the ground and tried to sleep. With the eternal accompaniment of coyotes howling like souls trapped in hell, it was a rum job. I cannot remember how we watered the horses.

Although there were no trees on the prairie, we did have an alternative source of fuel. The enormous herds of buffalo had gone by the time I got there but buffalo chips (their dried faeces) had been almost the only fuel used by the Indians and early settlers. Now, we had to rely on cows and dried cow pats were super. Without them, I would have found it difficult to produce the quick meals which were so necessary during the summer. In the intense dry heat of the prairie, a cow pat would become fit to burn within about a day of being dropped.

When Harold Andrews’ cornucopia ran dry, eating suddenly became a bit of a problem. Willy nilly, we had to go on to a diet of meat and wheat. The meat was all right but, though I boiled and baked wheat into many kinds of messes, I never liked any of them. Alec always referred to boiled wheat as 'frumety' and he claimed to have no memory of where this name came from: he just knew that boiled wheat was frumety. When, a few years ago, I was reading a Thomas Hardy novel, I found that Hardy, also, called it frumety. I wonder how the name travelled from Hardy to Alec? Frumety was not part of our diet at-Shenton.

On this diet, we probably had appalling vitamin and mineral deficiencies, but we never noticed their effects -- possibly because we were pretty miserable anyway. During the dust storms, it was impossible to avoid ingesting dust. I suspect our stomachs were not designed to expel this quickly and we all developed an awful form of indigestion. It caused terrible 'stomach pains' and these continued as long as the dust kept blowing; and the storms went on and on; and on.

The drought by itself would have been bad enough, but other things happened.

Grasshoppers (locusts) appeared and they really were heartbreaking. When they came over, they blotted out the sun and the noise of their wings was terrible. They seemed to settle for no good reason and might land on a poor crop after passing over a better one. But, wherever they settled, there would be no growth left when they flew away 2 hours later. When they tackled our garden, they ate the onions out of the soil.

Another trial was the dust storms. Strong winds on the prairie are common and, when the soil got dry during the drought, it blew away. It would strike the wire of a barbed wire fence, drop to the ground and, as the days wore on and the dust continued to

blow, the reef of dust at the fence would grow and, eventually, the fence would collapse. This, I suppose, was our fault. If the land had been left as virgin prairie, I am sure it would not have blown. I think we were ahead of our time in destroying the environment.

If this were not enough, Russian thistles (tumbleweed) appeared in huge numbers. Over and over and over they would tumble and, when they reached a fence, they stayed, trapping the dust until the fence broke; then they would tumble on to seed the prairie and so prevent us getting a good crop even if it had rained.

I doubt if anybody, anywhere, has ever seen a more depressing picture than we saw daily during the dry years; no growth, perpetual almost darkness because endless dust storms blotted out the sun, and all the time those damned thistles went over and over and over. If hell has anything worse to offer, it must be well worth seeing.

However, the real coup de grâce was man made. In 1929, the stock market crashed and, from then on, no amount of rain could have saved us. The price of wheat dropped to 20 cents a bushel and, if we could have grown it, we would have lost about 40 cents on each bushel. We all quickly went bankrupt. Young as I was, I realised that bankruptcy does not matter much if everybody else is bankrupt too. All our land was sold for taxes but nobody would buy it. And buyers would, I think, have faced gunfire when they tried to take possession.

As in other bleak parts of my life, there were compensations: Hungarian partridges turned up out of nowhere. They thrived but I do not know where they drank. They were marvellous birds.

Another compensation was softball. This is a variation of baseball but we could not afford the equipment for baseball, so had to compromise. Without the drought, we would not have had time to play but, as it was, this game turned out to be a life saver. We became keen players and talent appeared in unexpected people. We formed a league and no world series was ever contested so fiercely.

We were not well catered for in Pangman when human disease appeared. When I got there, old Doc Macdonald, who had been there for donkey's years, was nearing his end. I doubt if he had much medical knowledge but he was exactly what we needed; and he could peel a 40 lb box of apples faster than anybody else in the area. He died and his successor was a Frenchman, who was a brilliant doctor. I knew this because everybody told me he was; but he was almost permanently drunk. This did not affect us much because, even when we were ill, we could not afford to pay for a doctor, so we did not mind who or what sort the medico was.

CHAPTER 16A FEW MEMORIES OF THE PRAIRIE

We had only just missed being pioneer settlers on the prairie: many of the original squatters were still there when I arrived. My Uncle, Alf Hollands, whose father ran the mill at Higham Ferrars in Northamptonshire, was a squatter and, from talking to him and his contemporaries, I got a vivid picture of life up to, I should think, about 1915. Squatting was no longer legal when I arrived, but everybody was still homesteading.

The pioneers came to Winnipeg, which was as far as the railway went, from many countries though Germany, Austria, Sweden and Great Britain probably provided most of these settlers. In Winnipeg, Uncle Alf bought a team of oxen and a Red River (covered) wagon, which he loaded with a plough, shovel and other tools, household equipment, a gun (probably a 30/30 rifle and a shotgun) and as much staple food (beans, rice, bacon, flour, potatoes and so on) as he could carry -- or afford. Then he hitched the oxen and drove West, day after day and travelling only about 10 miles a day. When he came to a place he liked the look of or, more likely, when he could bear the monotony no longer, he stopped. By the squatting laws, the 160 acres he was on now belonged to him (assuming nobody else was already there!) and, later, he could homestead another 160 acres.

After squatting, the settlers hitched their oxen to a plough and turned a furrow. With a spade, they cut the furrow into bricks, which they used t o build sod shanties. They peeled potatoes and planted the peelings -- which gave them quite good crops.

Life must have been far worse for them than it was for us. Alf had to walk 38 miles to Weyburn when he wanted his mail though, presumably, the squatters would have collaborated on jobs like this. There was no medical help at all; there were no roads and precious few towns.

I am sure an epidemiologist would have forecast that the prairie community, being so thin on the ground, would have escaped the 1919 pandemic of influenza. Not so. When I arrived, they were still telling of the awful things which had happened. Those who died could not be buried until the ground thawed out, months later; and many families, all dead, were not found until Spring. The tragedies must have been frightful.

Since the prairie was laid out North and South, we tended to speak of situations in terms of compass bearings. I quickly got used to this but, when I first got there, it seemed odd to hear them talking about sitting west of the stove, the northeast corner of the hen house, and so on.

There were two brothers, Bill and Eber Syers, who had come up from Missouri in the early days. They were, with no exceptions, the best raconteurs I ever knew. Their shack was smallish but it had three big lightning conductors and this was because, years before, a girl from their home town had come up to cook for them during the summer. They were great blasphemers and, after hearing them talk for half a day, the girl insisted on the conductors. She said: "It would only be fair if God struck you dead, but I want no part in it!”

One evening during the summer, I was washing up and Alec was struck by lightning, which catapulted him off the bed where he was lying. He was badly shaken, but recovered. Later in the same evening, we went to turn the horses out to pasture and, as he went to shut the gate, he was struck again. I quizzed him pretty thoroughly about what he'd been up to but failed to find any reason for his double punishment. In any case, anybody who managed to do much in the way of sinning on the prairie

deserved commendation rather than punishment. For weeks afterwards though, I was a bit sulky because I thought he was keeping to himself something I would have liked to be in on.

Lightning storms on the prairie were frequent and rarely accompanied by rain. Deaths from lightning strike, especially among livestock, were common.

The Pentecostals (Holy Rollers) had a pretty tight grip on local religion. We used, occasionally, to attend their meetings, in the same spirit as theatre-goers. When they were on form, they could be quite entertaining. The congregation, like the preacher, seemed to think it necessary to talk in archaic English when addressing God. But, when they really got stuck in, they talked gibberish which, according to them was talking in tongues and indicated that God was talking through their mouths. Since what came out was stupid balderdash, I thought God would have been justified in charging them with slander. Also, they justified their name of Holy Rollers by flinging themselves on the floor and, sometimes, by trying to climb walls. It could be unnerving, especially as we knew the rollers to be quite (well, not quite) normal in real life.

Establishment religion was looked after by the Catholic and the United (similar to the Church of England) churches in Pangman. We were not church-goers but most of us went a few times to the United, simply to confirm that stories about Mrs Harold Andrews were true. And they were! She was very deaf and, when the parson began his sermon, would take her huge ear trumpet out of its big mahogany box and tune in on the pulpit. After a few minutes, she would dismantle it and, very noisily, return it to its box. Not many parsons had the effrontery to ignore the hint and her strategy usually worked well.

A situation which might have fitted well into the pages of Clochemerle occurred in Pangman while I was there. They reckoned they needed a mayor so, with humour which made them rock with laughter, the townspeople elected Harold Mayeur, of the harness shop, to do the job. (D'ya geddit? Mayeur for mayor!! Ho! Ho!!) While Harold was on a visit to England (for all I know, at our expense) he saw a fire brigade turn out and came back full of the wonder of it. He insisted that Pangman should have its own brigade and, after a lot of meetings, the fire station took shape. It was not exactly like the station he had seen in Birmingham but it satisfied all of us. A small pump, worked by two handles, was mounted on big wheels so that it could be taken fast to any fire in town. When it was placed in the shed which was specially built for it, with 'FIRE' painted big on its outside, we felt what I believe is called 'a sense of civic pride'. Inevitably, came the day: the pool hall caught fire and all the layabouts raced to the fire station and threw open the door, to reveal -- nothing. It needed no Maigret to investigate the mystery. Nick Oberly, an old German who farmed near Pangman had needed it temporarily, so hitched the pump behind his buggy when he went home one Saturday night. He forgot to bring it back, so the law took its majestic course. Nick appeared before the Deputy Sheriff and, after a musical comedy trial which lasted a full day, was fined 5 dollars and told not to do it again. Knowing Nick and the prevailing poverty, I doubt if he ever paid the fine.

We became extraordinarily phlegmatic about hardships -- probably because we jolly well had to be. One awful thing which I remember may not be uplifting to tell about, but it's a good illustration of what I mean, and other people probably went through the same sort of ordeals. Alec and I, during the height of summer in a drought year, both got smitten with what was probably a very virulent dose of food poisoning, marked especially by intense pain, perpetual vomiting and copious diarrhoea. For a day or so (we lost all track of time), we made some effort at hygienic behaviour but then lapsed into periods of unconsciousness -- and excrement. Could anybody

imagine anything worse? To top it off, we only had half a bucket of water in the shack and we were too weak to walk to the door, let alone the well. It was two skeletons that finally pulled through but I doubt if either of us dwelt on our illness -- or even mentioned it to a neighbour. It was just part of normal life on the prairie.

During the winter, a few families with big houses threw house parties. Really, they were dances but they were a lot of fun and generally lasted all night. Local talent supplied the music and it was by no means bad. Much of the dancing was square dancing and, as always, we thought the women were wonderful.

Also, we played a lot of bridge. In those days contract had only just been invented but we liked auction, which we played for no stakes at all. Playing would go on all night.

I dropped some mail in at a house as I rode by on my way home from Pangman and the young wife insisted on making me a snack. It included a boiled egg, which was as bad as an egg could possibly be (almost black, with a green iridescence, shrunk away from the shell and it smelt to high heaven) but I quickly ate it, so that my hostess would not be embarrassed. This was almost certainly the noblest act of my life. I bet Sir Galahad couldn't have done it. And I nearly couldn't.

In my day, we must surely have had the best duck shooting in the world. All the sloughs were thickly populated by duck, many of them mallard. Hank Webb (same age as I was) and I were exceptionally good with .22 rifles and we used to ride out on Sunday mornings and shoot a dozen mallard drakes (each), bring them to the shack, where we skinned out breasts and legs, dipped them in flour and fried them. It sounds like waste of what could have been an epicure's dream, but we liked them that way.

Another thing I remember is the snowy owls. They were huge, beautiful and fairly common. I liked them, especially when they glided beside me as I rode through the winter night.

But the greatest memories of all, I think, are of the weather. Those still, hot days in the fall, with cold, black nights and millions of stars and the northern lights banging away overhead as I rode home to the shack, will remain with me forever. I knew nothing but drudgery and hardship on the prairie, and I never even received any wages but the place still beckons me back -- though I know it has changed a bit.

When Effie and I spent a couple of months with Alec in 196l, the changes were immense -- though most of the inhabitants seemed not to have noticed them. For example, in my time, there were no deer, wolves, magpies or trees; in 1961, they were all plentiful. And everybody was rich. When they were poor, in the 1930s, there was a wonderful spirit in the community. In 1961, that seemed to have disappeared. In fact, I decided that these previously super people were now, with few exceptions, the ordinary rich bounders which are so plentiful in England.

Before farmers came to the prairie, big fires were common and, in my early years there, we had several fires which burnt huge areas of prairie wool. They were probably started by lightning and the fires may have prevented trees from establishing themselves. Roads and summer fallows stopped all but tiny fires occurring, and this seems to be a likely explanation of the recent appearance of trees?

CHAPTER 17BRITISH COLUMBIA

In talking about the prairie, I have implied that I stayed there throughout the dry years. I did not. Sometime during 1930, I think in February, I went to British Columbia to work in my Uncle Alfred's (the one who squatted) butcher's shop though, in Canada, these were called meat markets. For the next 5 years, I returned to the prairie for all, or part of, at least three summers but tended to winter in BC. Compared with the prairie, my time on the Pacific Coast was bliss but the whole thing has become hopelessly mixed up in my memory. This is unfortunate because I had expected my sojourn in BC would have dominated my life story. I did so many things there, and some of them were a bit offbeat but, possibly because my life became so full and mixed up, I can only remember snatches of this period. Probably, the best thing I can do is to put down a few of the highlights which have stayed with me. As was the case everywhere, the depression dominated everything.

Alf Hollands had married Gretta, my Mother's youngest sister. He was typical of his generation: a religious bigot who thought young people should be given no freedom at all. He also believed that hard work built character in youngsters. With my background, I found work no problem but he certainly got his money's worth: 30 dollars a month, it was.

He lived in Sidney, which is 18 miles north of Victoria on Vancouver Island, on the Saanich Peninsula, bordered by the Strait of. Georgia and the Saanich Inlet. It was a super place and the thick forest and lush greenery, after the arid prairie, almost made me gasp with wonder.

Several times a week, I had to get up at 4 am, light a fire under a copper, drive a pickup out to one of the farms, shoot a pig with a .22 rifle, bleed it, use a block and tackle to hoist it into the pickup, drive back and scald and dress it. This brought me to my normal getting up time, 6 am. I washed the shop until 8 am, then a quick breakfast, followed by a rapid dressing of the shop and its windows. Morning and afternoon delivery rounds in the pickup, sometimes up to 20 miles away and up through some primitive forest trails, making enormous amounts of sausage (a job I liked -- possibly because I love sausage) and serving in the shop filled the days in nicely until 6 pm, after which meat went back into the walk-in frig and the shop was stripped and cleaned.

Buying beef from Swifts and Burns, the big American wholesalers in Victoria, was a job I did not like much. However carefully I chose it, Alf always bellyached, though I thought mine compared well with what he got.

Presumably because my memory has again let me down, I cannot remember us selling mutton or lamb. Probably, I fetched them already dressed from Victoria but I cannot remember doing this. Nor can I remember seeing sheep in the fields.

As well as meat, we sold vegetables and I enjoyed buying these from the many Chinese market gardeners on Vancouver Island. They were nice people: honest and could, apparently, grow anything, in huge quantities. We sold vast amounts of asparagus and I used to pack this, upright, into deep trays of water overnight, before putting it up into 1 lb bundles. Overnight, it would increase in weight by at least 25 per cent.

Among the young folk, none of us had much money but we had what we thought was a good time. One memory I treasure is of community singing. I doubt if any of us had particularly fine voices but I have happy memories of groups of us lying around in the

moonlight and singing songs like Nellie Gray, The Mocking Bird (we really let ourselves go on this), Nancy Dill and endless negro spirituals. Sometimes, we would borrow a boat and sail, row or, if John Dobson were visiting his uncle, go under power to an island in the Strait (there were hundreds of them). We always trolled a line over the stern on the way over and, if we were lucky (we often were), we caught one or more salmon and this would really make a barbecue go. Digging and eating clams, cooking sausages and singing was our idea of a super evening and, apart from mild necking, I doubt if serious sex ever played much part in our pleasure. In those far off pre-pill days, we were painfully moral -- but only because we, and especially the females were scared to be anything else.

We did lots of other things too. I remember plainly one evening when a chap named Bob Homewood and I decided to camp on top of Mount Newton. As far as I can remember, our only impedimenta was a 40 lb water melon, which got steadily lighter as we sweated our way up. At the top, we sat and talked and, when we got tired, we simply lay down (no nonsense about sleeping bags in those days) about 20 feet apart. Just before dawn, a curious and oft repeated sound woke me and this turned out to be the sound made by a nightjar (we called them skitter hawks). It was hawking for mosquitoes, which were plentiful over Bob; it stooped as a falcon would but, just as it reached the column of slitters, it unfolded its wings so they arched underneath its body, and so slowed it down. It is the wind rushing through the spread wing feathers which makes the peculiar noise. I sometimes wonder if anybody else ever had a ringside seat at a nightjar hunt. When nightjars were around while I was fishing in Cumberland, the noise always took me back to Mount Newton.

Later, I was concerned with Bob and another fellow, Bert Ward, in what might have been a profitable venture. During the 1800s, a Lieut. Leech RN jumped ship in Victoria and escaped to the interior. He found a rich pocket of placer gold in a river which was named after him. The town, Leechtown, which developed there, was a ghost town by the 1930s; except for one miner who seemed to have lived there for about 50 years. He was the crustiest character I have ever come across but he lived in a log cabin which shone with cleanliness and contained things which had been made most ingeniously: almost all beautifully carved out of wood. I do not know what he ate, because he would not tell us. He was neatly shaven, which we found surprising.

The three of us, Bob, Bert and I, had read a few books about placer gold, spent a long time studying maps of the area, and decided the gold in Leech River probably came from Wolf Creek, a tributary just upstream from Leechtown. We got miners' licences (I still have mine), went in and staked claims on Wolf Creek, came back and recorded them at the mining office in Victoria -- and never went back to work them! About 20 years later, Bob wrote to tell me a big deposit had been found on Wolf Creek. Bill Lidgate, a fellow we used to get around with in Sidney, went in, re-staked my claim, registered it and sold it for 85,000 dollars without ever going back to it. Just another of my many failures, but the real pleasure from it had been the expedition and the fact that we had deduced correctly the origin of the gold. Or we had made a lucky guess!

Leechtown was, I think, the first ghost town I ever saw and I never did get over my feeling of awe when I visited them. I always pictured the hopes and griefs and wondered what sort of people lived in the various cabins. Effie was with me when I saw the last one: Bridge River, at the top end of the Cariboo. For a short time, in about 1932, I had worked there for the Bridge River Mining Company, helping to build a trestle bridge. I could still picture the hopes and fears of those who used to live there. Robert W Service is, I think, a much underrated poet who, for me, captured the

real spirit of the gold rushes. This is not surprising because, after all, he was there during their hey-day.

During my time in Sidney, I led a debate on the stock market. I cannot remember who organised it, or why I was roped in as leader of the proposers of a motion which was something like: Resolved that high finance and especially the trade in stocks and shares, is iniquitous. Having been on the receiving end of the damage caused by manipulation of money, I really put my back into preparing the brief for me and my team. The encounter took place in a big hall in Victoria and drew a biggish audience.

Soon after I got to Sidney, I found there was -a big public library on Quadra Street, Victoria, and this played a big part in my life in BC. Just before I arrived there, a cougar was shot on the steps of this library, so I think we were not all that far from frontier days. I asked a librarian for literature on the financial world and, as they always did, on any subject, they produced information in vast quantities. And this was the first time I realised that I was by no means a nonentity when it came to mugging up a subject quickly. We won the debate and the knowledge I gained from this exercise has helped to keep us in a reasonable state of financial health.

After I left Sidney, in about 1933, most of my time was spent in or near Duncan, 60 miles north of Victoria, on the mainland (not on the Saanich peninsula) of the island. And I worked mainly in timber. Logging, in those days, was a pretty free and easy business and providing safe conditions for workers was by no means a priority for the logging companies. The dominant firms on the south end of the Island were the Cowichan Lake Logging Company and the Hillcrest Sawmill outfit. I worked for both of them.

It is lucky that environmentalists did not exist in those days: they would have had fits about the technique of logging; it was governed entirely by the state of the market. In my day, there was little demand for that wonderful wood, western red cedar, or hemlock, but douglas fir sold well. We took only fir from the forest but, in getting it, we destroyed all the other timber. When we left a valley, it would have a layer of deadfalls and branches more than 20 feet deep and we were all aware that regeneration would not start for a long time; most people thought for not less that 50 to 100 years. Now they have studied what has actually happened, I understand the forestry people consider that 200 years elapse before the real forest begins to appear.

Those virgin forests were undoubtedly the most impressive things I have ever seen. The size of the trees and the quiet, which was so quiet you could almost hear it, seemed to put our little problems into their proper perspective. Also, I often used to wonder if anybody else had ever stepped on the land I was walking on. In Duncan, I rented a three-roomed house from a chap named Appleby, whose three sons had been educated at Dulwich College. It was in the middle of a small (say 100 acres) patch of virgin forest. I lived there for 18 months while I worked at Hillcrest and, every night when I came home, I got the same feeling of peace. My dining arrangements there were simple: every evening, I had corned beef, mashed potatoes, carrots and apple sauce (stewed apples); and I think I liked it better every time I ate it. In 1982, I took Effie to see this house, or at least the forest. As far as I could gather, my house had been just about where the check out of a supermarket is now.

One of the girls who used to visit me in this house made curtains for my bedroom. Every morning, chipmunks (like squirrels) would come through the window and scold me furiously. When the curtains came, they just loved it: tore them to shreds and took them away, presumably for nest building.

Work in the sawmill was hard and dangerous. For most of my time, I ran a planing machine, which turned rough sawn boards into tongue and groove, drop siding, scantlins and similar shapes. Its usual speed was 800 feet/minute and that made hard going. Splinters the size of pub darts used to fly out of the machine at bullet speed but I always escaped serious damage, though I was winged a few times. Others were not so lucky and some horrible injuries occurred while I was there.

Spare time life was good and did not cost much. It was still dominated by community singing and Duncan was a super place for this. The Cliffs, just outside town, formed one bank of the Kokhsilah -- a biggish river. Some of the happiest nights of my life were spent there -- just talking and singing. It sounds dim beyond belief but we all loved it. And the river was great for swimming: deep, with good diving take-offs.

When I was 19 years old, another fellow of the same age, Alan Prevost, and I decided we would find out what being drunk was like. We did it on that awful Canadian beer and both decided: “NEVER again!” Since then, I have had too much on a few occasions and I cannot understand why some people get drunk regularly. It makes me so ill and ashamed of myself that I shall never again take too much.

The library in Victoria still helped me a lot. For a bit, I read religion -- all the religions the library could dig up. What followed on from that was philosophy, and Bertrand Russell's History of Philosophy hit me like a bombshell. I drew no firm conclusions from this reading but it certainly made me think and I tried to work out a code for living.

I was in Duncan when Mother visited Auntie Gretta in Sidney but the only thing I remember about her visit is the first time I went to visit her. I also met her when I went back while she was on the prairie.

By this time, I had developed enough confidence to despise those who paid train fares; we old timers rode the rods. Traditionally, hobos rode on the brace rods, which are beside the wheels but I never saw anybody doing this and it must have been not only dangerous but excruciatingly uncomfortable. But the term riding the rods stems from this alleged practice -- though I just do not believe anybody could ever have been so stupid as to ride there. Most of the time, I rode on top of the box cars, but it depended on what was available; the sidewalks of tankers, also, were acceptable. I still shudder at the thought of evading the transport police at Roger's sugar refinery in Vancouver, to catch the 10 pm transcontinental freight. I never knew what I was going to climb on to, or what the weather was going to be like, or whether the brakies were going to have a crack at chucking a hobo off a fast moving train. This happened, but not too of ten because the hobos were willing and able to retaliate in kind. However you did it, it was dashed dirty, riding behind a coal-burning engine which was climbing over the Rockies. It was tiring and dangerous, but was the only way I could have afforded the trips back to Saskatchewan.

Compared with the prairie, my life in BC was marvellous: a lot of work but much less hardship, lots of company of my own age and opposite sex, a bit of spending money (which, for me, did not exist on the prairie) and a super climate. But the prairie is the place that still calls me back.

CHAPTER 18STUDENT YEARS

It was obvious that I was drifting so I decided, reluctantly, to come home. Ted and Mollie were extremely kind and, without their help, I could not have made it. In late 1935 (or early 1936; I cannot remember), I was again jolly seasick during a voyage from New York to Glasgow. I remember we passed the Queen Mary, which was being built on the Clyde.

Ted had got married on the salary of a lecturer in the University School of Agriculture in George Square, Edinburgh. On this salary, £150, he ran a car and lived in a decent three bedroomed house with a good garden at 50 Clermiston Road, Barnton, a rather posh suburb about 5 miles west of the centre of the city. Later, he moved to a substantial home in Wardie Avenue, Goldenacre.

It took me a little while to weigh up the possibilities of various university courses but, eventually, I plumped for veterinary science. They promised to accept me if I could get 'A' markings in maths, chemistry and botany in Scottish Highers. It was 9 years since I had done any serious studying, so I did not fancy my chances of getting the As and I still shudder at the memory of how difficult it was. When I got stuck, Ted was able to help me in maths and a friend of his, Bob Ironsides, helped me -- competently in chemistry but a bit less surely in botany. Fourteen hours a day for 14 weeks got me through, but I doubt if I could ever have repeated such an effort.

I bought a bike (Raleigh’s best all steel) for £5 and, during the next 5 years, it snapped in two four times. I hiked in every day the five and a bit miles from Barnton to the veterinary school. Getting tucked into the slip stream of an SMT bus may have been dangerous and could certainly be wet, but I fancied myself at doing this and it speeded the journey up nicely.

After a year, I left Ted and Mollie and moved into digs with Ma McKay, over a pub near the school. I still have fond memories of her. Her age was indeterminate and she was by no means a sylph and she fed me like a fighting cock for £1 a week. This included a hot lunch and a fire in my bed sitter on winter evenings. In return, I put out a pretty serious fire which started in her kitchen after the chimney caught fire one Sunday morning. I wanted to call the fire brigade but she forbade it: chimney fires were punished by a seven and sixpenny fine. Rabbit and haddock figured rather heavily in her cooking, but she kept me full of calories and I am still grateful to Ma McKay.

I really enjoyed living over the pub. At chucking out time, some wonderful arguments developed and, with the window open, I could hear every word. One thing this taught me was: the one who wins an argument is by no means the one who is right. Some of the drinkers were clever debaters and hardly ever did they resort to fisticuffs.

Again, my memory has let me down. I know that I returned to Ted and Mollie after my year over the pub, but I do not think I stayed the whole 3 years with them. On the other hand, I've no memory of living anywhere else. When war broke out, while I was in fourth year, Ted and I lived alone and Mollie took the kids to her folk's farm in Rutland.

By the time I had entered second year, it had become obvious that I was running out of money. I applied to Leicestershire Education Authority and they were good to me -- though they were certainly hard-headed business men. They seemed to be obsessed by the fear that I would die before I managed to repay them, so they insured my life,

at my expense. They also charged a good rate of interest, but I was well pleased to have the money on any terms. It took a bit of paying back after I qualified.

During fourth year, I took a job as full time Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Warden. This involved 8 hours work a day but it also gave me four lovely pounds every week. As much as I could, I did the overnight stints but I sometimes had to do day shifts. This was awkward for studies but my friends put in class cards for me, and lent me their notes. I did badly in the professional exams but my financial position had never been so good. The job was a joke. In theory, we had to dig people out of their bombed homes and organise the rescue services generally. In practice, we used to amuse ourselves by walking around and shouting the cry which echoed through the land in those days: "Put that (adjective according to taste) light out!"

The Scots had always assumed that Edinburgh and Glasgow would be the main German targets, and Glasgow did take some awful poundings. The Edinburgh population seemed to be a bit huffy because they were ignored.

Even as students, we agreed that our course was ill thought-out and badly taught. Physiology (study of function) was a notable exception to this. It was taught by a very old man (probably about 20 years younger than I am now) who was outstandingly irascible but I think we all realised his behaviour merely reflected the irritation caused by our stupidity. Therefore, we forgave him. I still know a bit about physiology.

Anatomy was an example of poor teaching. We did 3 years of it, with hundreds of hours of dissection. This was right up my street: lots of long hours of hard work, for which few brains were needed. I got a distinction in my professional exam -- and I still know nothing about anatomy.

We had an entertaining fellow teaching us pathology. He was alleged to devote all his spare time to translating Greek poetry into German poetry. He may have been good at this but, as a teacher of pathology, he was a disaster. Shortly after I left, he was found dead in his chair and I always thought the chap who realised this should have been awarded that year's clinical medal.

The University, for a reason that was not clear to us, decided to run a course leading to BSc (Vet. Sc.) and a few of us enrolled for it. Presumably, they considered such a small class did not warrant the expense of laying on a proper course, so almost all our classes were in postgraduate medical courses.

We learnt some funny things during medical classes and one which still makes me laugh concerned the bathing at Musselburgh, just down river from Edinburgh. There was a good bathing beach there and, throughout Victorian times, the bathers filled the newspapers with bitter complaints that their swimming was frequently spoilt because they had to push aside unaltered hunks of human excrement which were bobbing along beside them. In the early 1900s, the city fathers decided to put a stop to this disgraceful situation: they installed an emulsifier and there had never been another complaint.

Only five of us graduated, after working hard for our extra, and quite useless degree.

We had to see practice for a minimum of 6 months before we were allowed to qualify. The practices which played host to me were distributed from Aberdeen to Banwell, near Bristol. The vets who accepted us all seemed to have two characteristics in common: they wanted lots of work from us; and they peddled their own (often absurd) theories to us.

In those days, the patent medicine quacks were busy organising themselves into pharmaceutical companies and had not started functioning properly. Sulphonamides had just appeared and Fleming, about 5 years previously, had made his original observation on contaminated plates in his laboratory outside Paddington Station, but Chain and Florey did not finish development of antibiotics until after I had qualified. After this, the pharmaceutical companies took off and became as rich as armaments makers -- and probably killed about as many people.

We, in those horse and buggy days made our own medicines. It is likely that we killed as many animals, but we did it far more cheaply. Our course included a year's pharmacology and, in veterinary practice, much of the profit came from prescribing lots of medicine. Most were given in the form of powders, ointments, liniments and mixtures, and students seeing practice worked long hours dispensing them. By the time I left my practice, the vets were so stocked up they would not need to do any dispensing for months; and I was cross-eyed from wrapping powders.

A great, and detrimental, development in pharmacology since those days has been a simple change in nomenclature: we referred to the bad effects associated with some medicines as poisonous properties. Now, they are called side effects and most medicines seem to have them. The wonder drug of this year is generally known to be useless, or dangerous, or both next year.

During my final year, I was on duty in the consulting room. A brigadier brought his Irish terrier in to have its dewclaws removed. I told him to wait and took it through to surgery, where the acting house surgeon infiltrated with cocaine hydrochloride. The dog quickly developed risus sardonicus (a sardonic smile), went stiff as a board and died. The student who had made up the anaesthetic had used strychnine hydrochloride instead of cocaine hydrochloride -- the sort of accident which our methods made impossible, but it had happened. The diagnosis was easy. Telling the owner was a bit more difficult. And, if you think it's a pleasant job, letting a brigadier know that the dog he brought in for a minor operation is now dead and would he like us to get rid of it, I am in a position to tell you that you are wrong.

I was concerned a bit more closely with another accident during my final year. The school horsebox was fantastic. It was enormous, had solid rubber tyres and a Dennis engine which, though temperamental and generally needing prolonged winding of the handle to start it, could not be faulted on the amount of smoke it produced. It also had to be double declutched and I seemed to be the only student who could do this reasonably expertly. I often was called on to use it for collecting and returning horses to the college hospital. One day, I found out the hard way that the box was a bit higher than a railway bridge on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Funnily enough, this accident brought me nothing but praise from the staff; they had wanted a new box for years.

This horse box played another part in my life: driving along Prince's Street (probably one of the poshest streets in Europe) I saw Effie, who had been my semi-official girl friend since second year, so I pulled into the sidewalk and took her aboard. I still do not know if she really appreciated, or hated, this far from posh pick-up. Anyway, she did not jilt me.

War started in 1939, when I had just entered fourth year. The refreshing lack of jingoism was equally apparent in the chaps who had been keenest members of the Officers' Training Corps. But, since the armed services were not yet geared up for training troops, shortage of volunteers in the early days probably did not matter. During the Battle of Britain, lots of us volunteered for the RAF, hoping we could get

into Spitfires. We were told to finish our studies but at least three from our year dropped out and joined up. I was not among them.

Ages later, when I was in Cumberland, I got a letter telling me that, unless I could provide a valid reason for being reserved, they were going to conscript me. Effie and I talked it over and I replied, saying I saw no reason for my reservation. By return of post, I got a terrific ticking off because, as a member of the research council, I was not allowed to volunteer. I still wonder why but, in my usual cowardly way, I was jolly grateful.

Always, while I was a student, lack of cash played a big part in my life and I did my best to remedy it by earning money during the holidays. During my 3 months' holiday in the Summer of 1939, I worked on a farm 4 miles north of Dundee. In one of the farm cottages, a couple with 5 children, including a babe in arms, lived. They had been caught up in the plan to evacuate young children to places which were believed to be safe from bombing. Obeying instructions, the Mum set off at 5 am on 4 September and, with the 5 kids, walked the 4 miles into Dundee. After a long wait, they were bussed to St Andrews, from where they were bussed to Edinburgh and then, arriving at 11 pm, they were bussed back to a house a few hundred yards from where she had started in the morning. The poor woman had a little cry and then trudged back to her own home. This was just one example of vast numbers of odd happenings at that time. It would have taken a genius to organise evacuation of millions of children.

Other jobs which I had included working for Alan, and sorting letters in the Edinburgh Post Office.

Edinburgh had a wonderful public library and it was as helpful to me as the one in Victoria had been. Possibly, even more so because Effie was one of the librarians. We met, I think, during my second year, but we were both destitute. Every weekend, we went walking, generally over the Pentlands; rarely less than 20 miles if the weather were suitable. This entailed lashing out a bit of cash: tuppence each to the end of the tramlines. Sandwiches provided sustenance so it was not too expensive. When she was on late shift, I would swot until 8 pm, walk (and run) 4 miles to pick her up at 9 pm, walk her 3 miles to her home in Blackhall, and then walk 4 miles back to Goldenacre. Now, neither of us can walk the few hundred yards to Buckingham.

I qualified on 18 July 1941, got engaged to Effie and, next day, we went to stay with Gretta at Chapel en le Frith, in Derbyshire. John was away at the war. John's Father was the postmaster in Chapel and he suggested we might make money by delivering telegrams. I bet they had never been delivered so promptly. We called at the Post Office about 20 times a day because we quickly found that delivering them singly was the best way to make money.

Effie stayed for a couple of weeks and then I took over the job of postman on the Chapel/Chinley round. I started early and, on a big, heavy post office bicycle, I carried a bag of letters to Chinley, a few miles away, delivering on the way. There, I collected and sorted more mail and started a long round into the hills. When I got to the bit where the road ran out, I propped the bike against a wall surrounding a field and set off on foot.

There was a black, waterproof cape strapped to the big front carrier of the bike and, one day, I returned from my walk to find a horse just finishing tearing it to shreds. On the form I filled in for a new cape, to the question 'What happened to the old one?' I answered 'A horse ate it'. To its credit, the post office took this in its stride and sent me a new cape.

You may wonder why, after qualifying as a vet, I did not work as a vet. At that time, farming was badly depressed and, for a bit, farmers stopped using vets. The only assistantship I was offered was in Durham and it offered no salary -- not even board and lodging. So, after the postman returned to take over his job again, I got a job in the nearby Ferrodo brake-lining factory. Surprisingly, this was an interesting experience and I learned a lot. However, it was as well that I did not stay long, because the atmosphere in the factory was full of asbestos. I saw no evidence of it but I suspect that a lot of asbestosis was developing.

CHAPTER 19GENERAL PRACTICE

In about October 1941, I was offered a job in Totnes in south Devon: four guineas a week and live in, but they always paid me £4 and I was too gutless to ask for the extra 4 shillings. The vet had what turned out to be terminal cancer, was in hospital most of the time, and could not work when he came home. It was a mixed practice, covering a big area.

One profitable thing was a contract with the Royal Navy barracks at Dartmouth. I had to go there every month to inspect their stable of riding horses.

Another contract, not so profitable, was with the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Every Monday afternoon, I ran a big clinic for them in Torquay. This was surprisingly hard work but it provided a few laughs -- or 'wry amusement' might better have described my feelings. The clinic was intended to be a source of free veterinary treatment for the pets of those who could not afford to pay. It turned out to be much more than that: people who were obviously wealthy would turn up in droves, often for trivial treatment which would have cost them only a bob or two. Many of the owners, after telling me all about the dog's cough or whatever, would seek medical advice about their own health. It could be embarrassing and difficult, but was often funny. I tried my hand on a few interesting operations in the clinic but most of the surgery was taken up by spayings and castrations of cats. The big, fat RSPCA girl and I developed a marvellously rapid technique of castration; we had to be fast because there were generally 20 or more castrations to do. The only defect in our technique was caused by a reflex action I could not get rid of: I flicked away the testes. Wall, light bulbs, door handles, windows and everywhere else were plastered with testes at the end of each session. We did this clinic as an act of charity.

Again, I had fallen into a job which entailed a lot of work. I do not suppose I ever got up later than 6 am; if I had, I could not possibly have completed the day's work. And if, by any chance, a gap in the work did appear, I always had to dispense stacks of medicine.

I planned to devote every afternoon to surgery but I could rarely finish before it was time to begin my afternoon round. This meant that my evening work of filling in the day book, costing bills, writing letters and trying to fit dinner in somewhere had to have a few operations fitted into the programme.

Night calls were frequent and, though most of them were justified, it made hard work. I could rarely get to bed before midnight and I used to curse heartily when the phone woke me. The commonest call was to a calving and these could entail hard physical work. Even in those days, farmers thought only of profit when they planned their activities. They bred from young heifers, using the huge south Devon bulls and the result, 9 months later, was a calf too big to be born.

Just after I qualified, the schools began to teach students how to do Caesarean section but, although I often decided that, next time, I would have a crack at working out my own technique, I always funked it. However, I developed some ingenious ways of saving both cow and calf. Driving home from these late night cases, I had a super feeling that I was doing a worthwhile job: without my visit, two animals would have died and the poor old farmer (most of them really were poor in those days) would have lost a lot of money. I regularly used to sing my heart out on the way home, despite the tiredness.

Not infrequently after these night calls, the phone would ring again just as I was dropping back to sleep. I expect I did not do so much singing on these second turnouts.

To me, equine practice was the most interesting and we had a lot of wealthy clients who kept horses. The trouble was that, in those days, horse vetting was difficult. I do not know when horses began to go up on to their tip toes but this strange transformation in search of speed (the hock joint is the horse's heel) has produced an animal which is particularly prone to get orthopaedic problems. As vets, we knew a bit about the causes of lameness but we were less than brilliant at curing it. Today's orthopaedic surgeons seem to be efficient but, in my day, things were different. On the other hand, centuries of experience and a lot of common sense had gone into producing a fairly good folklore -- or vetlore.

We could, or thought we could, usually deduce what was causing the lameness, and picture the state of the hidden tissue. As far as I know, all the vets who preceded us relied heavily on firing to treat lameness but I and, I believe, most of my contemporaries looked upon this as being too barbarous for our weak stomachs; though, even today, a few diehards still practise it. The theory behind it, roughly, was based on the fact that a tight bandage can be used to support ligaments and tendons. Therefore, if you burn skin over the appropriate area, the healing process will produce a layer of fibrous tissue which will function as an even better bandage; also, the inflammatory process stimulated by the burning will help to heal the underlying lesions. This line of thinking produced a big literature because, in those days, nobody talked much about experimental method and those who did experiments tended to overlook controls. Exponents of firing designed wonderful instruments for 'point firing', 'herringbone firing', 'line firing' and a lot of other nonsense.

I was not tainted by firing but I had a firm and almost certainly unjustified belief in what is called counter-irritation. My faith may have come from memories of Mother's liniment for chest complaints. An application of this liniment tended to make the patient forget all about his original complaint: s/he had more serious problems after Mother applied the liniment.

Lame horses to which I was called would get a pretty thorough examination but, with few exceptions, they all got roughly the same treatment: complete rest, generally at pasture; and frequent applications of liniment. Surprisingly, many of them recovered but I think this was yet another example of the healing power of nature. Nine out of ten patients recover spontaneously.

One distressing aspect of treating horses was the fact that they were owned, and worshipped by, young people in many cases. It upset me deeply when I had to tell these young owners that further treatment was unjustified, or when the horse died.

My feelings about small animal practice are easily described: I did not like it. The patients were, on the whole, not too difficult to treat. Owners were a bit more I formidable. Many of the clients were wealthy and I suppose, with my background, I was almost certain to be antagonistic to them as a class but I feel safe in saying that a lot of them really were poisonous people. Admittedly, others of this class were super; but there were not so many of them.

There was a real problem of ethics in small-animal practice. For example, dogs often develop chronic interstitial nephritis when they get old; they tend to smell, lose hair, fill up with fluid, may be a bit incontinent and cannot be cured. At the risk of being accused of anthropomorphism, I always thought, and still think, these dogs should be killed. If I suggested that, the owners often became huffy and went to another vet, so

we lost a client. If they agreed, we lost a patient. Since money was so scarce, I cannot, sadly, swear that I always recommended what, in all honesty, I thought should be the treatment: euthanasia.

Soon after I went to Totnes, I began to get a swollen head (literally, not metaphorically, so no obvious jokes, please) and my thumbs and wrists swelled. Serum exuded from the swollen surfaces and I felt pretty bad while the attacks lasted. Generally, but not always, I quickly recovered. It gradually dawned on me that these attacks came, always, within an hour or so of me handling cattle. I was quickly able to confirm this and, by this time, it was obvious that I had got to leave general practice. This was a pity, because I was in the process of buying into the practice as a full partner.

At first, I thought I had developed an allergy to cattle but I was, later, able to show that the allergy was to a bacterium, Brucella abortus, a common pathogen of cattle which has ruined the life of many a vet. This organism has now been nearly eradicated but, when I was in practice, most herds were infected, so I assumed it was cattle which stimulated my reaction.

Abandoning practice was a real blow to me, because I loved it. I got on well with clients (even with the small-animal owners -- which shows how two-faced I have always been), I enjoyed the work, and I thought I was doing a worthwhile job. And what more could anybody want?

I think my biggest problem in practice would have been the fees. In many cases, although I had worked hard to prevent it, the animal had died and I found it difficult to put in a full charge for these cases. Also, some farmers were so obviously poor that a stiff bill from the vet might have been the last straw. I tempered the wind to the shorn lamb and I might have become a good vet but doubt if I would ever have become a millionaire.

After deciding to pull up my stakes, everything went well for me. I applied to the Colonial Service and, just before I went for interview, Gretta forwarded a telegram from the Research Council, with a firm offer of a job in Great Britain. Since the salary was to be £400, I accepted it, and cancelled my interview.

CHAPTER 20PURE RESEARCH

After making me sign the Official Secrets Act, the administrators of Whitehall turned me over to the scientists with whom I was to work. The job genuinely was secret and I had to spread myself about a bit. Officially, I worked from the London School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) but, later, I found it best to work from the Central Veterinary Laboratory (CVL) at Weybridge. My opposite numbers in the actual work were members of the staff at Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) at Teddington. And my ultimate boss was Wigglesworth, the Professor of Entomology at Cambridge. The affair was badly organised, though this was not the fault of those who actually had to do the work.

For my benefit, government had rented a flock of 750 breeding ewes on a hill farm in southwest Cumberland. In typical civil service fashion, they had forgotten -- or probably never knew -- that I would need a shepherd and, for the first few months, I had to do most of the shepherding myself, helped by the farmer's son, Benny. Since the sheep were out on the fells (mountains), I had a hard job looking after them, as well as keeping the experimental work going. I had to walk about 12 miles every time I collected the flock. Fortunately, the dogs were magnificent.

The farmer was wonderful. His Cumbrian accent, combined with the fact that, while he was serving in the Coldstream Guards during World War I, the roof of his mouth had been badly damaged by shrapnel made it difficult to understand him. Quite quickly, though, I got the knack and he really was worth listening to. I did not always agree with his views on life but he certainly expressed them in pungent language. And he was not the world's biggest supporter of the establishment, so he and I had a bit in common.

Because of the war, building was impossible, so the Research Council provided me with a 16 x 16 ft hut beside a super little stream (beck) in one of the fields. This beck was a joy: full of things like caddis fly larvae, dragon flies, trout, elvers coming back from the Sargasso Sea and, once, an enormous eel.

Talking of eels, when the locals were fishing for salmon, using worm as bait (a cad's trick if ever there were one!), if an eel took the bait, they had developed a technique to prevent the eel tangling the cast and line. This involved cutting the eel's head off and, one day, I met our farmer coming away from the river. He was in a foul temper because he had cut the head off an exceptionally big eel and, when he was taking the bodiless head off the hook, it (the head) bit him; quite badly. He seemed to think the head had not been playing the game.

The laboratory hut was idyllic in summer but cold in winter, and this led to an invention of which I was modestly proud. I put two Bunsen burners (we had calor gas cylinders) under each of two 3-litre flasks full of water. From each flask, yards and yards of glass tubing ran round the walls, to end in 8-litre aspirators. The flasks were kept bubbling furiously until the water had almost boiled away and, of course, all the steam condensed on its way to the aspirators. When the Bunsens were removed, the flasks cooled, a vacuum formed, the flasks refilled and the Bunsens were replaced.

I, of course, was a complete tiro in research but the library at LSTM and, later, at CVL was helpful. I read stacks of books on statistics but understood only parts of them. Had I been able to spend unlimited time on it, I might have done better but the experimental work pretty well filled all my waking hours for seven days each week; I could not spend enough time educating myself. However, I learned how to plan an

experiment and how to do elementary statistical treatment of the results. And this almost led to a mental breakdown.

I had to do hundreds of T-tests, chi-squared tests and geometric means. And I had not got an adding machine. All the machines I had seen were like huge typewriters which, after each number had been punched in, had a big handle pulled and the machine rumbled a bit before coming up with an answer. A pocket calculator would have revolutionised my life but, alas, they had not been invented. An application to the Research Council for an adding machine produced no results. I had to spend hours every evening and night, wondering how much longer I could stick it. I doubt if anybody has ever added together (by hand) more logarithms than I did then.

I had to go to London fairly frequently, to do laboratory work and to attend meetings; Dean's Yard Westminster and I became old friends as the years rolled on. Because London was taking such a pasting, some of these journeys were a bit unusual.

I used to arrive at Euston station at about 4 or 5 am and walk across to Waterloo. Twice, the bombs were still falling and fires raging during my walk. I think one of the most surprising things to emerge was the difficulty of destroying a big city. London, during a raid, would look to have been almost demolished but, a few weeks later, and give or take a few bombsites (which made wonderful parking lots), business seemed to have returned to normal. One school of thought believed that Londoners were wonderful and that no other race could have resisted the blitz so successfully. I doubt this. If you are subjected to a terrible ordeal, and cannot get away from it, you have to make the best of it. What, to the outsider, appears to be bravery may be no more than the stoicism induced by necessity. However, it's still a wonderful quality. The inhabitants of Beirut could probably tell us a lot about it.

Towards the end of the War, V1 (flying bombs) and V2 (rockets) began to be used. A lot of them fell on South London, which is where CVL is, and they were not pleasant.

Whether all countries are the same about meetings, I do not know but the British love them. One result which can be guaranteed to emerge from hours of discussion is a decision to hold another meeting. Privately I suspected this gregariousness was not unconnected with the fact that travelling and subsistence allowances can be turned into a worthwhile source of tax free income. Two highly placed people (both were knighted not long afterwards) were nothing to do with my work but they used to travel third class to me in Cumberland, walk along the train corridor just before it pulled into Ravenglass station, and climb out of a first class coach. I used to see the green tickets (first class were white) which they handed in and, if I had missed it, old Harry, the porter, would have told me. The difference between first and third class fares, plus the money they would claim for the food we gave them, probably made it seem to have been worthwhile.

These people, also, were clever in their choices of venues. For no reason that I could see, we sometimes met at a beautiful experimental husbandry farm in the Scottish Highlands. Though I enjoyed my visits, I always felt guilty about it.

Living in the Southeast, especially in London, had lost a lot of its attractions because of the War. If I invited a chap to visit me for a day or so, he was, naturally, delighted: he would get away from the bombs to a place where the food was a bit more plentiful. One episode which I well remember illustrates an important point about the taste of food.

Wigglesworth and a chap called Lees from LSTM had come up for a couple of days. On the second day, we had been up the fell and, when we came down, hot and tired, I

invited them into our cottage for a cup of tea. Effie had gone away for a few days but had left me two big blackberry and apple plate tarts, which my visitors thought scrumptious. We finished one and I offered to broach the other but they, thank God, refused. After I had put them on the late train, I came home, made myself a cup of cocoa, cut a generous wedge of tart and sat back, book in one hand, to my frugal supper. Without stopping reading, I grabbed my piece of tart, took a bite -- and instantly threw down the book, ran outside and spat it out. It was sausage and egg tart which, because I had expected blackberry and apple, tasted foul. In fact, as most of Effie's cooking was, it was super.

The laboratory work which had to be done in the South was difficult to fit in because I could only spend odd days in London. Gradually, I transferred from LSTM to CVL. While I was in the South, I had to visit quite a bit at LSTM and DSIR but my main work was in biochemistry at CVL. Before I left CVL for the last time, I put 1,600 tiny samples of wool, each in a specimen tube and labelled with its own identification number, into the laboratory loft. I now feel guilty about this because, knowing the methods used in the Civil Service, I bet any money that, once each year, these samples are dusted and returned to store -- 44 years after I put them there.

By this time, the original experimental work had finished and, right from the start, I had taken the opportunity, in conjunction with my other work, to examine possible methods of controlling sheep ticks, Ixodes ricinus, L. I published the work and, as a result, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons; I think in 1947.

CHAPTER 21FAMILY LIFE

Our family life was not typical of the model couple. But, I suspect, many married couples have similar conceits: that they were different. Anyway, you can judge for yourselves.

I worked up to the last possible minute on 17 September 1942, arranged my work so I could park the car in Carlisle, and went by train to Ted and Mollie in Edinburgh. Mother was already there.

Next day, I well remember that Mollie gave us cauliflower cheese for lunch. Then, I put on me Sunday suit (wartime weddings were, perforce, rather ordinary affairs as far as ceremony was concerned), Effie and I were married in the Presbyterian church in Blackhall and, after a reception at Effie's Mother's house, we went on honeymoon. It rained, I remember, fairly hard all day and we had to get a bus to Waverley Station, where we got a train to Carlisle. Effie, greatly daring, had turned her engagement ring diamonds inwards and booked a room at the Victoria Hotel, in the name of Mr and Mrs Heath.

We spent a few days walking in the countryside around Carlisle, then unparked the car and went to the Fish Hotel in Cockermouth, where I had to attend a meeting next day. I was able to show off my wonderful wife to my colleagues and, after another night in the hotel, we went to the village of Eskdale Green where we stayed, or nearby, for 11 years.

Greatly daring, because all my money had gone to our heads, we had rented a rather posh house called Waimata. It was beside a tiny railway which everybody called the ratty because the engine and carriages looked just like a rat creeping through the tall bracken. The track was about 12 inch gauge and the tiny steam locomotive pulled trucks of stone from a quarry up the valley to Ravenglass, for transhipment to the ordinary railway. Except in the war years, it also pulled passenger coaches during the tourist season.

Waimata was a pleasant, fair-sized house which we rented from two spinster sisters in Whitehaven. They told us in detail the origin of the name but all we can remember is that it came from New Zealand. The two things I do remember about the house are: all water had to be pumped, by hand, up into the loft; and we collaborated in breaking an awful lot of things. For example, I smashed a big light-shade when all I was doing was putting up the ironing board for Effie. When we left, I called on the sisters with a list of breakages, which we had recorded meticulously. I felt a bit scared when I told them our tale of woe, because we could not have paid much. I need not have worried: they assured me all their other tenants had been far more destructive, and they would not accept any money.

If we went to the bottom of our garden, stepped on to the ratty, turned right and walked 7 miles, we came to Ravenglass station. When I caught the evening train, we would walk to Ravenglass (though I would always claim mileage) and, after seeing me on to the train, Effie would walk home. What toughies we all were in those days!

By walking along and across the valley, I could get to the farm in about 4 miles, and this was my usual method of transport. Effie would generally meet me halfway at nightfall.

I have always realised the danger of spending more than I earn so I began to keep detailed books as soon as I qualified. These records now make entertaining reading.

Every New Year's Eve of our married life, we have balanced our books. In our first balance, the best we could say was that we owed £ll. I still owed money to Ted and Mollie and the Leicester lot. After careful consideration, we decided that Waimata was too expensive and, by chance, Cragg Cottage on our farm became vacant. It was 10 shillings a week rent, so we moved in and Effie began 10 years' exposure to sheer hell. It was pretty awful but she coped and the kids and I loved it. Anyway, I did.

The cottage was about 400 years old, had oak floors upstairs, four bedrooms, a privy at the bottom of a fair-sized garden, no bath, telephone, gas or electricity. Just the dream house Effie had always hoped for! The stone slab floor in the kitchen and the concrete in the scullery particularly endeared the place to her -- in a manner of speaking. It was 2 miles off the highway and we were 4 miles from Ravenglass.

I suppose all the mod cons were represented by the grocer, Dick Woodall, who came every month for orders, which he delivered two days later. Also, there was a weekly visit from the butcher. Billy Rothery brought the mail and, unless his mugs of tea and his gossips were unduly prolonged we generally got it by about noon.

Effie became a terrific cook and I still think that ovens beside a fire produce better pastry than modern ovens do; and they certainly yield better rice puddings. It was quite a sight to see Effie test the temperature of the oven by shoving her hand in, make an instant decision which she would implement by putting on more fire or damping things down. And it always seemed to come right. She had to bake all our bread.

We wore away at the defects of the cottage as the years rolled by. Running water came from a pool in the nearby beck and the brown colour and snails provided a problem similar to the one we had at the laboratory. But Effie got a couple of fingerling trout out of her tap and this gave her a feeling that she really had escaped from city life. We put in a bathroom and loo and, because I had the Ministry to help me, the telephone came eventually. However, it was pretty primitive right up to the end and Effie deserves, and receives, great credit for the way in which she accepted everything, and coped so successfully.

I had to spend our second winter at CVL and, by a bit of crookery (my boss obviously fancied her), Effie got taken on as a laboratory attendant at CVL. It worked well but she was pregnant and had to leave before Spring.

When the family arrived things were much more difficult. After she realised she was pregnant, in 1943, Effie reported to Dr Parker, in nearby Gosforth. Although he was a dear old man, he never should have been a doctor. He agreed that she ought to have the birth at Whitehaven hospital, 25 miles away. A month before the expected date, Parker signed a form for the hospital to say that he expected a normal delivery. At about the same time, Effie began to complain that she thought she was carrying a football team, so I palpated her and found twins -- both breech presentations. Things went off well and Michael (6¼ lb) and John (4½ lb) were born, with a 5 minute interval, on 16 June 1944. I had to spend part of the next winter at CVL, so you can imagine the hell Effie went through. Keeping the twins warm was almost impossible, but she managed it. She took them to her Mother in Edinburgh for part of the winter.