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THE DIFFERENCE

I moved from Loscombe - often called The Valley of the Flowers because of the carpets of snowdrops in the spring -to the heights of Eggardon Hill in the autumn of 1950 and stayed for some thirty years.

Some of the family died there, others were born and brought up on that uninviting escarpment. Visitors to the farm came and went for the whole of that period and the impression they got, the remarks they made, hardly varied. “What a wonderful place to live! You are lucky. Just look at that view!” and they would become ecstatic as they looked at Powerstock Common and caught a glimpse of the fallow deer making a meal on my newly sown ley which had cost me lord knows what to put down.

Out would come the glasses and they would see a fox in the distance and they would coo as if it were a baby and I would tell them about the night the generator failed and when I went to fix it I heard the hens squalling as a fox pulled their legs off through the slatted floor where they perched for the night. And again it was the view which took their attention and I would tell them how we watched the rain coming from the west whilst we were trying to save all the hay before it got to us and how the Common would disappear from sight behind the heavy storm and then, how it suddenly stopped and the earth steamed and a rainbow ended in the middle of the Common and we forgot the wet bales and became absorbed in the beauty of it all and in speculation about the crock of gold. “You are lucky,” they insisted, living here by yourselves with no neighbours to worry about and I would tell them of the complaints when the sheep or cattle got out and how some people in the country were just as intolerant as their cousins in the town, perhaps more so with their petty sense of sovereignty. But you can forget these self-interested people when another neighbour will give freely of time and equipment and ask no reward.

Another thing these people thought, these people from the towns who came to stay in the country once a year. They thought that I did not appreciate the place I lived in, its beautiful landscapes and sense of freedom. They were wrong. Or were they? The trouble is, when you live on the land and by the land there is precious little time to stop and absorb the beauty of the surroundings. If one had time to lean on a convenient gate one’s eye was immediately drawn to the work which needed urgent attention. This especially applies in the ‘active season’, March to September. There is, at a glance, grass to be cut, weeds to be dealt with, the gap made by the cattle to be fixed and so on so that the mind only fleetingly thinks about the surrounding picture and when it does it is straightaway drawn to something more mundane.

If one is on holiday the mind can be concentrated on something more leisurely, more to one’s liking and, if you’re from the town, something you don’t see in your usual daily life and isn’t that what a holiday is for? To re-line the mind for a while, give it a change so that at the end of the time the return to the ‘ordinary’ can be faced with a lighter step.

People who live on the land, by and large, do not take holidays but this has nothing to do with the place where they live and work. Should they indulge in that luxury they will go to the town or the sea for a change of surroundings but their means of livelihood is a seven day week affair and work becomes a habit.

“You should get away” they would say but I never had the inclination to do so. Apart from the cost and the difficulty of finding a reliable person to run the place, it didn’t enter into my head that I should have a holiday, an attitude not very popular in a certain quarter I can tell you!

If, whilst you are reading this, the sun is shining, I am glad for you and hope that your holiday is all sunshine because that means that those who live permanently in this beautiful county will be able to get about their work with a lighter step.