When I was eight years old, my dad inherited the family home and we moved from my cosy life on a housing estate in Staffordshire to what was, as far as I was concerned, the middle of nowhere. This was a largeish Victorian farmhouse standing in its own grounds in south Cheshire, surrounded by outbuildings which had been used by my grandfather and his predecessors to run a successful agricultural equipment suppliers.
You may think this led to much hilarious fish-out-of-water shenanigans in a 1970s version of the Durrells. But to be honest, I just put up with it in the way people do in the real world. I was never particularly happy with rural life – I didn’t want to ride horses or muck out the cows, like all my new friends at my new primary school were doing. When I got to high school a couple of years later, I was at least mixing with kids who lived on housing estates again… but they were all at least five miles away down a busy country A-road with no pavements, and my parents were too busy making a go of the huge money pit they’d had foisted on them to drive me anywhere.
I know it sounds horrendously ungrateful and selfish of me to have reacted like that. But living in a big house with a huge garden is not really the joyous experience you might think, when there’s a general all-pervading air of penury attached to it.
Of course, it wasn’t all bad… there were some things about rural life I enjoyed, like having a knackered old moped to drive up and down what was essentially my own private road, and an air rifle to ping away at tin cans whenever I felt like it. I recently met up with some old school friends and they reminded me how amazing it was to spend time at my house and do these things, as well as checking the oak panelling for secret passages, and helping ourselves to draft beer from the bar in the cellar.
So perhaps my judgement on my late childhood was coloured by my annoyance at never getting the Atari I so desperately wanted for Christmas. And us not getting a VHS recorder until 1987.
One thing rural life did serve up with astonishing regularity was an assortment of oddballs who looked and sounded like they’d come straight from the pages of Cold Comfort Farm. One of these came up in a conversation with my dad at his recent 82nd birthday party. Dad never really talks about the past. He never really talks much at all, but when he does it’s usually about the here and now – the last book he read, how Manchester United are getting on, recent work he’s done on their house (not the family pile, they finally gave up on that 20 years ago and moved to a nice little cottage).
But as we finished up the fancy pub meal, talk turned to our 80s experience, and I mentioned how once, I’d been chased away from a nearby farm by an angry nutcase whose corduroy trousers were held up with a bailer twine belt and whose jumper and wellies combination was made up of more holes and cowshit than material.
“Ah, yes,” he replied. “That was _______ ___________. He was a proper character.”
I’ve got a shocking memory (the above blanking out of the name in a Victorian novel style is as much about me forgetting the name as it is about protecting their identity), but I countered that I seemed to remember there was some doubt at the time about the guy’s parentage.
“Yes, there was a sister, but nobody knew who the mother was. There was some suggestion they were one and the same.”
Rural life, eh?
So we chatted on, and I explained how for some reason I’d ridden my push bike down the lane towards his house, only to get an unwarranted and quite spectacular reaction. As I recall, I turned my bike around and pedalled like my life depended on it, with him coming after me at a fast walk like a pink-faced, tweed-jacketed T-1000.
Which led to one of dad’s rare stories.
“No-one really went to their farm, it was quite out of the way and they kept themselves to themselves. But I remember one time I had to go for some business reason. The thing that surprised me was that they’d got a tree burning in the grate in their living room.”
“What, you mean an excessively big log?” we all asked.
“No, I mean a tree. They’d chopped down a huge tree, dragged it whole into the house, pushed the end into the grate and then set fire to it. Once the top of the tree had burned down, they got a crowbar and levered the next bit of the tree into the grate to keep burning, with some force.” (he demonstrated this with hand movements and a bit of grunting)
“The thing was, it was a cold day – and the tree was so huge that it went across the floor of the living room, into the hall and out of the front door, so they couldn’t actually shut the doors to keep the heat in.”
The story finished there, with much hilarity around the table. It’s worth bearing in mind here that part of dad’s business was the fixing and selling of chainsaws… but that wasn’t why he was visiting the farm. They were happy with their tree-burning solution to fetching in firewood.
The image of this has stayed with me since hearing it. It’s so nuts that every time I think of it, it raises more questions that I’ll never get the answer to. How can people think that this is an acceptable, or even effective, way of keeping a fire in? At what point during the process did they think – sod this, let’s put the axe down and pick the tree up? What kind of tree was it? How long did they persevere, with the doors wide open like that? Did they eventually have to drag this smoking, charred trunk back out into the yard, where it sat as a monument to failed labour-saving ideas for the next decade or so? Why didn’t they take the idea to Dragons’ Den? Just how much strength would it take to ram a burning tree trunk into the back end of a fireplace with enough force to shatter it? How come they didn’t burn down their home or at the very least fundamentally damage the structure of it? What kind of a mind thinks that all the hard work this needed was preferable to lopping off a few branches to burn?
You may think this led to much hilarious fish-out-of-water shenanigans in a 1970s version of the Durrells. But to be honest, I just put up with it in the way people do in the real world. I was never particularly happy with rural life – I didn’t want to ride horses or muck out the cows, like all my new friends at my new primary school were doing. When I got to high school a couple of years later, I was at least mixing with kids who lived on housing estates again… but they were all at least five miles away down a busy country A-road with no pavements, and my parents were too busy making a go of the huge money pit they’d had foisted on them to drive me anywhere.
I know it sounds horrendously ungrateful and selfish of me to have reacted like that. But living in a big house with a huge garden is not really the joyous experience you might think, when there’s a general all-pervading air of penury attached to it.
Of course, it wasn’t all bad… there were some things about rural life I enjoyed, like having a knackered old moped to drive up and down what was essentially my own private road, and an air rifle to ping away at tin cans whenever I felt like it. I recently met up with some old school friends and they reminded me how amazing it was to spend time at my house and do these things, as well as checking the oak panelling for secret passages, and helping ourselves to draft beer from the bar in the cellar.
So perhaps my judgement on my late childhood was coloured by my annoyance at never getting the Atari I so desperately wanted for Christmas. And us not getting a VHS recorder until 1987.
One thing rural life did serve up with astonishing regularity was an assortment of oddballs who looked and sounded like they’d come straight from the pages of Cold Comfort Farm. One of these came up in a conversation with my dad at his recent 82nd birthday party. Dad never really talks about the past. He never really talks much at all, but when he does it’s usually about the here and now – the last book he read, how Manchester United are getting on, recent work he’s done on their house (not the family pile, they finally gave up on that 20 years ago and moved to a nice little cottage).
But as we finished up the fancy pub meal, talk turned to our 80s experience, and I mentioned how once, I’d been chased away from a nearby farm by an angry nutcase whose corduroy trousers were held up with a bailer twine belt and whose jumper and wellies combination was made up of more holes and cowshit than material.
“Ah, yes,” he replied. “That was _______ ___________. He was a proper character.”
I’ve got a shocking memory (the above blanking out of the name in a Victorian novel style is as much about me forgetting the name as it is about protecting their identity), but I countered that I seemed to remember there was some doubt at the time about the guy’s parentage.
“Yes, there was a sister, but nobody knew who the mother was. There was some suggestion they were one and the same.”
Rural life, eh?
So we chatted on, and I explained how for some reason I’d ridden my push bike down the lane towards his house, only to get an unwarranted and quite spectacular reaction. As I recall, I turned my bike around and pedalled like my life depended on it, with him coming after me at a fast walk like a pink-faced, tweed-jacketed T-1000.
Which led to one of dad’s rare stories.
“No-one really went to their farm, it was quite out of the way and they kept themselves to themselves. But I remember one time I had to go for some business reason. The thing that surprised me was that they’d got a tree burning in the grate in their living room.”
“What, you mean an excessively big log?” we all asked.
“No, I mean a tree. They’d chopped down a huge tree, dragged it whole into the house, pushed the end into the grate and then set fire to it. Once the top of the tree had burned down, they got a crowbar and levered the next bit of the tree into the grate to keep burning, with some force.” (he demonstrated this with hand movements and a bit of grunting)
“The thing was, it was a cold day – and the tree was so huge that it went across the floor of the living room, into the hall and out of the front door, so they couldn’t actually shut the doors to keep the heat in.”
The story finished there, with much hilarity around the table. It’s worth bearing in mind here that part of dad’s business was the fixing and selling of chainsaws… but that wasn’t why he was visiting the farm. They were happy with their tree-burning solution to fetching in firewood.
The image of this has stayed with me since hearing it. It’s so nuts that every time I think of it, it raises more questions that I’ll never get the answer to. How can people think that this is an acceptable, or even effective, way of keeping a fire in? At what point during the process did they think – sod this, let’s put the axe down and pick the tree up? What kind of tree was it? How long did they persevere, with the doors wide open like that? Did they eventually have to drag this smoking, charred trunk back out into the yard, where it sat as a monument to failed labour-saving ideas for the next decade or so? Why didn’t they take the idea to Dragons’ Den? Just how much strength would it take to ram a burning tree trunk into the back end of a fireplace with enough force to shatter it? How come they didn’t burn down their home or at the very least fundamentally damage the structure of it? What kind of a mind thinks that all the hard work this needed was preferable to lopping off a few branches to burn?
The thing is, at a most basic level, I can utterly believe it did happen. Because it feels right, for the time, the place and the people involved. Perhaps they only did it once, and realised it didn’t really work. Or perhaps it was the way they always ran their fireplace etiquette, the top end of a tree merrily burning away in the grate, the rest of it splitting the room down the middle, the front doors wide open and the resultant draught being kept at bay by the insane blaze. Meanwhile, the family are gazing into the flames, happy in the knowledge that they’ve saved all the effort of chopping up the tree into manageable chunks, and all they have to do instead is stand up every half hour or so and force it into the grate, inch by inch.
No comments:
Post a Comment