Lineage

This piece gave led to writing a more detailed account of my rural childhood in the 60’s and early 70’s.  Go here to read extracts.

He worked as a stockman and general hand on the farms
of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, using tools and methods that
would not have been entirely unfamiliar to his great-grandfather.
And we, his children, grew up with the farm buildings and the
surrounding lanes and fields as our playground,
thinking nothing of the fact that the nearest town of any size
was half an hour away by bus,
thinking nothing of no mod cons.
Mum did the laundry in an old copper,
dad grew all our vegetables in the garden,
the house was heated by open fires
and we only had an inside loo just after I was born in ’57.
But we knew the name of every bird and tree and plant,
we knew where to go to watch foxes on a summer evening,
and knew, too, the difference between a plough and a harrow.

Today, reading my brother’s description of his childhood,
I realised how much we were shaped by that rural landscape,
as surely as the farmers shaped the land itself.
All those places, like the farms where dad worked,
are gone now,
the farm machinery of that time become museum pieces,
mass production doesn’t allow for the slow and seasonal life we knew.
It all leaves us with a sense of dispossession,
like a tribal people driven from their territory,
making compromises so that we can say
the word home.