Post 12 new year – old beginnings

 

A hopeful new year to you all; which is a big ask, considering what’s going on all over the globe. Somewhere, thousands of miles away in space, the James Webb telescope is seeking the answer to how our planet, and life upon it, started. As usual, I wrote a short poem back in the eighties, about my take on the eternal question!

 

HOW FAR?

From some distant dying sun
All our atoms have begun
From this infinite stellar source
Comes all life’s potential force
But, even further out than this
Were we formed in an abyss?

 

 

 

 

 

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In the very recent past, just before Christmas, listening to the reports of the dreadful weather ‘up North’ I was reminded of past Winters, when we were living on our smallholding, up a stony, mile long track with a one in four incline. When it snowed we had to rely on our ability to adapt; to survive and keep ourselves, and our animals, alive.

And, we had to make our own entertainment; hence the game of crasket (getting a ball into various containers dotted around the kitchen)!

INDOOR GAMES    (some time in the eighties)       

The wind wails past
Whistles round our walls.
Inside we listen
Inside we function safe and sound
Crasket game in progress
Ball into bucket
Brother plays brother
Howl goes the wind
Screeching with indifferent fury
Ball bounces from floor into bucket
Five four the score
Rain hits, like bullets on the pane
Into the bucket drops the ball again
Five all
A fierce squall takes the dustbin
In a wild clattering along the wall
Inside, controlled, into the bucket
Falls the ball.

The following is an excerpt from the diary of 1982. I particularly remember that Winter, as I was heavily pregnant with Patrick; our youngest. All family members, except me, were hoping that I would have to be air lifted to hospital for the birth. Thank goodness I avoided this entertaining event; and our last child was born at home; as had his brother and sister before him. 

FORTY YEARS AGO . . . 

 JANUARY 1982 . . . . .

 First entry of the new year and what a year so far! The worst snowfalls and the coldest weather since 1947; the year of the big freeze. Two weeks before Christmas we had blizzards. We couldn’t get out for three weeks. Three days ago we had more snow and this made the previous falls look a bit amateur! We have got fifteen foot drifts in our track and, unless a rapid thaw sets in, we may be snowed in for months.

The whole of Wales has ground to a halt. Most roads are blocked with snow drifts and farmers all over this land are frantically digging away trying to get their milk to the depot. John ( our neighbour) and his ‘boys’ dug all the way to Newcastle Emlyn ( some seven miles) to deliver theirs; and they’ve kept the road clear of new drifts. John should be running the country. . . .

(other memories of the ‘big snow’)

 The shops ran out of food.. . .  We had to dig a path through the yard (every morning) so that we could feed the animals and milk the cows. Luckily we only had three to milk. Some farmers lost all their herds to mastitis. You can’t physically hand milk huge herds. . . . The workshop barn filled up with fine snow blowing in through every gap. Very luckily we thought to check our house loft space only to discover it was cram jam full of frozen snow. We spent a whole day bucketing it out in case it thawed suddenly; ever the optimists! . . .  We had to be very ingenious to keep the water pipe to the cowshed from freezing up, looping it up and down so that there was no straight run in the pipe where the water could settle. . . . Many snowy walks up and down the track to the car stranded at the bottom.. . .  a huge long lived snowman on the lawn looms at us through the kitchen window. . . . .  and the kids toboggan down our field on plastic sacks stuffed with straw.

We wouldn’t let the kids out of the back door for two days; We were afraid they would disappear into one of the huge drifts and never be seen again. But the snow soon froze and you only had to worry about breaking some part of your anatomy on the unforgiving  solid surface. We could just see the roof of our caravan; an elderly relic wherein once had dwelt Andy, our friend and Pete’s labourer.  The kids loved the trenches we dug from one building to another. For them those days were a Winter playground.

The first urgent problem was animal feed. We had enough hay for two weeks and had arranged delivery of more just before the first falls. Pete had to resort to borrowing a neighbour’s tractor, carting the bales to our neighbour’s field and then tobogganing them across a field to our land. A days hard work saw a hundred bales stacked in our Dutch barn and bovine hunger averted.

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Despite the hard labour and discomfort of those times, I feel glad that, for a few short years, we experienced life as it must have been lived by generations of past farmers and smallholders. The satisfaction of repairing a hedge, in the teeth of a Northerly gale and driving rain; or repairing the track that regularly washed away; keeping our animals safe and properly looked after and, most of all, raising our children in an environment that has nigh on disappeared in the present day.

Mind you, I don’t know if they would agree with that conclusion!