Bob Bell: Remembering a Move to the Countryside
It’s funny how some events stick in our memory and others disappear into the fog of the past. Certain occasions in life are life-changing, upending the status quo and forever affecting the path to the future, and that are hot branded, as it were, into our memory banks, and yet other events, equally consequential, dissipate and disappear like the sparkle and smoke from an erstwhile brilliant roman candle.
Just such an occurrence is the mystery of how I ended up in Treborough, in West Somerset’s Brendon Hills late in 1973. I had left my job at Island Records at the end of 1972, and moved to a small hamlet outside Minehead, to work with a couple of friends renovating an old cottage belonging to another friend’s mother. By the summer of that year, I had fallen in love with Hilary, sister of one of my builder buddies, and in true dharma bum fashion, she and I lived in a tent in some woods close to Dunster. She worked as a waitress at a restaurant in Minehead, and I continued building. As autumn approached, living under canvas became damper, colder, and not quite so romantic. And there was the small matter of hygiene. It was one thing for me to wash in a nearby stream before setting off for work on a building site, it was another for Hilary to succeed in banishing the scent of woodsmoke from herself and her clothes before a day of waitressing.
So we needed a real roof over our heads. And this is where memory fails me. Just who it was that mentioned that there was a vacant cottage in Treborough, I have no idea. But there was a vacant cottage there, in the farmyard of Higher Court Farm, and we moved in at the end of the summer. Hot water, a gas stove in the kitchen, an antique but working refrigerator, a Rayburn stove in the living room that not only heated the house, but also the water, a bathroom and two bedrooms upstairs. Our bedroom looked out over part of the farmyard, with pens and ancient stone stalls abutting a vast partly thatched and very ancient stone and cob barn, down the valley, past a copse of beech trees, and gave a partial view of the distant meadows, through which we soon discovered, one could walk to Luxborough, the next village, a distance of a mile or two. By road, the distance was more like seven or eight miles.
It was an idyllic spot. As a child, my family had always vacationed in the West Country, and so living on the farm was, for me, like being on a perpetual holiday. Lying in bed at night one would hear the sounds of ewes calling for lambs, cows gently bellowing come-hithers to calves, the distant hooting of owls echoing in the valley, sounds that strangely became spectral as they exercised our minds, dogs from the neighbouring farm informing the hills that they had scented a far-off fox, and the wind soughing through the beeches, a constant sifting of the leaves, now a soft murmur and then a gossipy clamour, followed by a short mumbling silence, developing again into a murmur. To maximise the experience, we raised the head of the bed by setting the legs up on a couple of bricks, which gave us a better sense of the panorama outside. With both windows at the foot of the bed fully open, we’d snuggle under blankets as the westerly wind brought us all these mysterious tidings from afar, wrapped in fragrant whiffs of manure and hay, silage and Somerset’s lush and aromatic fecundity, and the lowings and bleatings became fainter, and the valley became swathed in darkness, slumbering under the West Country moon.
Hilary left the restaurant and spent her days working in the garden, and I volunteered to repair some of the crumbling stone walls around the farmyard. It was only a matter of days before the two of us became increasingly entwined in farm life. I was constantly called from the wall I was rebuilding to help round up cattle that had strayed through broken fences several fields away, and I soon realised that fence repair had to trump wall repair, and so within a few weeks of living in the cottage, I was on the farm payroll, learning about cattle, the intricacies of driving David Brown tractors, devouring The Farmers Weekly, and living rent free. How much I got paid I really can’t recall, but I think it was seven or eight pounds a week. A princely sum to be paid for the simple act of living in paradise.
Daily life began with The Routine, which followed a quick breakfast of cereal and a cup of tea, which started by gathering the eggs, which was an interesting adventure as the chickens were not only free range, they were free roosting. The flock was a bewildering aggregation of every breed of chicken one could imagine, and then some. Rhode Island Reds, Leghorns, Orpingtons, Sussex, Plymouth Rock, Wyandotte’s, plus a mad variety of bantams of all colours imaginable, and all of course, cross-breeding in all directions. They had the run of the yards and outbuildings and thus made their nests where they wanted. One soon learned where most of the nests were, but every few days one would find a fresh nest, with maybe a dozen eggs in it, of unproven vintage. That entailed putting them in a bowl of water, and those that floated were old. The ones that sunk you took your chances with.
Then to the main part of the routine, the feeding of the herd. In the winter, the steers and heifers were wintered in a large barn, close to the farmhouse, where they were fed barley and concentrate in addition to the silage they had 24-hour access to. The silage was in a second large barn adjacent to the building in which they spent their winter days, and was behind a strand of electrified wire that had to be moved forward a few inches every day as the animals ate their way through this mountain of nutritious and fermented grass. The wire, powered by a 12-volt battery, had to be constantly checked for current - if it was shorted out by anything, the cows very quickly realised that they had unfettered access to the silage, and chaos and mayhem ensued. And much silage was spoiled.
The main breeding herd was up on the common, Treborough Common, where there was another barn and silage clamp, and the same process was followed there. We had around 120 cows, mainly Hereford and Hereford crosses, but a good smattering of Angus, some Friesians, and a couple of Ayrshires. It was a mile or two from the farmhouse to the common, uphill all the way, and we’d get there on tractors, tractors with no cabs, and seats with no cushions other than perhaps a bit of foam and a fertiliser bag to keep it dry. Once up there one could see twenty or thirty miles in every direction - in the winter, clouds would anchor themselves on the hill for days on end, and on those days it was invariably a wet and cold trip to the common and back.
The routine was usually over by 9.30 or 10, and we’d all converge back at the farmhouse for a communal breakfast, a big huge and hearty breakfast, which necessarily had to be huge and hearty because it was on most occasions the last opportunity to eat before supper, after the day’s work was done. And it was at breakfast that the day’s work would be discussed and planned, and farm life being farm life, that depended upon the weather.
And upon Garfield.
Garfield was the postman. I have no idea what his full name was, whether he was Mr Garfield Someone, or Mr Someone Garfield. To all of us, he was simply Garfield. He walked from Luxborough where the Post Office was, through the meadows, past the cottage at the bottom end of the lane, up past Lower Court Farm, and finished his morning delivery at Higher Court Farm. His mother had had the round before he, and quite possibly her mother or father before that. Who knows?
Anyway, the thing was that whatever tasks Higher Court or Lower Court might address each day depended upon the weather.
And it was Garfield upon whom we all depended.
If the morning routine went as planned, we would be back at the farmhouse just in time to meet Garfield, who would predict the day’s weather with what seemed to be uncanny accuracy. If perchance we missed him because of problems with the electric fence or a sick cow, we would hopefully run into Harry Bishop astride his tractor in the lane outside our yard, just finishing his morning routine, who had seen him a few minutes before, and who had debriefed the oracle.
Depending upon Garfield’s prognostications, we would mow grass, spread fertiliser or harrow ploughed land in the sunshine, or spend a rainy day inside the machine shed repairing equipment in the dry. The rhythm of our days was determined by this twinkly-eyed man of sixty-odd years, clothed in the same apparel day in and day out. A vest, flannel shirt, a waistcoat and jacket, blue serge trousers - and in the winter a long overcoat atop it all - and his postman’s cap. He always had time to chat, always had a boiled sweet in a waistcoat pocket to offer, and a kind word for my children, who quickly learned about the boiled sweets.
After his departure, as he walked alone through the meadows, back to Luxborough, we’d breakfast and plan the day, and now and then ponder upon just how this old countryman acquired his wisdom. Was it how the cows in the meadows stood, backs to the wind? Or lay in the luxuriant greensward, chewing and truly ruminating? The calls the crows made at dawn? Blissful and sublime sunsets or disturbing and portentous sunrises? What signs and harbingers signified what? It was all a mystery, a conundrum, a riddle that bordered upon the arcane. Just what age-old rustic and esoteric secrets did this unassuming postman possess?
Eventually, one morning, bothered and confounded by these unending speculations, I simply had to broach the subject: ‘Garfield, I’m just amazed that you are so accurate with the weather. How do you do it?’
A little surprised by the question, he rubbed his eyes, adjusted his cap and unwrapped a mint. Popping it into his mouth, he regarded me with a puzzled look.
‘Well’, he said, in that soft Somerset burr, ’tis quite simple, really. I gets up at four and puts the kettle on, and then turns on the BBC, and listens to the weather. Not much to it, really.’
