The House

The year was 1941. Mum was in agony for five days in the Maternity Unit of the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, because I was awkward and unable to arrive. However, the doctor insisted and I was born five days late, looking as though I'd done ten rounds in the ring and lost badly. Mum was horrified when she was offered this battered scrap, and convinced that I was maimed for life. In later life I've often thought that I was, but somehow I've muddled through my three score and ten.
When we'd both recovered sufficiently my father took us home to the farm we rented on the Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire border, but not before we visited my Uncle Randall, who lived in Wytham, just west of Oxford across the Thames. I grew to love him dearly as I got to know him.
My father, H F 'Jim' Wise, farmed all his working life. When he met and married my mother Dorothy she was working as a nurse in the Birmingham Children's Hospital, and was on a holiday cycling tour from London to the Cotswolds visiting distant relatives along the way. She'd heard about a branch of the family farming in the upper Thames valley, and eventually found her way to their beautiful old stone farmhouse near Faringdon, then in Berkshire, where my father farmed.
They started married life in the large old Cotswold farmhouse, where Mum soon got used to looking after her parents-in-law, an aged aunt, various cats, dogs, chickens, ducks and an ever changing variety of sick or orphaned farm animals.

It is worth noting, at this point, that our lovely house, and it was lovely, had no electricity, no bathroom, no telephone, no TV, no central heating, no roof insulation, no anything that could be considered modern at all, with one exception, our large, old box radio. More of that later. 
I was born the year after Mum and Dad were married, and shared feeding time with whichever needy piglet or calf was around at the time. I would be in the crook of one arm being breast-fed while Mum's other arm would be wrestling a bottle-teat into the mouth of a struggling piglet. As far as I'm aware she never mixed us up, and it could explain my lifelong love of animals, more kin than kine.
Our old creaking, whispering farmhouse was alive. As a small boy, on dark winter nights, I was led up our creaking stairs to bed by Mum, holding out a delicately flaming candle which threatened to go out with every breath of air. I clung to her warm and comforting free hand. On every side shadows danced and dodged closer. I knew that I'd soon be alone with them when she went downstairs.
In winter my bed was cosy because she warmed it beforehand with a warming pan full of hot ashes from our living room fire. I sank as deep into the bed as I could, pulling the feather eiderdown up to my chin, while Mum looked along my bookshelf suggesting stories I might like to hear.
In the way children often do, I chose creepy, scary ones that I knew I would regret as soon as Mum went back downstairs, but which I couldn't resist because they conjured up such vivid pictures in my mind. Often it was Grimm's Fairy Tales, so heart-breaking, so cruel, so irresistible. I was particularly scared of the dogs which guarded the Tinderbox. Their eyes got bigger, their teeth sharper and their growls fiercer each time I heard the story. For ages afterwards I would be wary of any trees with holes round their roots, and I listened for low, throaty growls.
Other choices, just as rich in this small boy's imagination, included the Ice Queen, the Little Mermaid, the Wizard of Oz, and my favourite, which would surely be frowned on these days, The Tales of Brer Rabbit. He was seriously clever and managed to escape each dastardly plan to capture him. He was my earliest hero.
Whatever the story, it would eventually end, Mum would kiss me, and then take the candle downstairs again.
I was alone with the darkness, although it wasn't really the darkness that scared me. It was the sounds. Old houses talk. They creak and groan and whisper, as ancient timbers and masonry adjust to changing temperature, humidity, wind and weather. I know that now, but I didn't then. Monsters, ghosts and ghouls stalked the stairs and roamed the attics. And I hid under the sheets.
When I was a little older this passed, and I heard our gentle, giant cart horses shifting in their stalls, cows lowing to their newborn calves in the sheds across the yard and our old sheepdog yipping to itself downstairs as it chased a hare across a dream.
Such was our sound track. Our nearest neighbours lived across a field, and no TV blared from open windows.
We had no TV. Neither did anyone else where we lived. Dad had a big old box wireless (now known as radio) downstairs on which he occasionally listened the news and cricket commentaries on the BBC Light Programme and the BBC Home Service, now Radio Two and Radio Four. Mum, when she had a moment, listened to The Third Programme (Radio Three), which broadcast classical music. They all went off air late at night. After all, who wanted to listen to the wireless in the middle of the night?
Radio One did not come along until the sixties, in answer to rapidly expanding pirate radio. The front of our wireless had a wonderful programme dial with a 'clock' hand that was turned by the large knurled tuning knob. I say it was wonderful because it promised a whole wide world of wireless shows from such exotic sounding places as Bangkok, Hilversum and Johannesburg. Many times I tried patiently to summon up these stations by careful tuning, but never succeeded. BBC from London was the only thing available in English, although had I been multilingual I might have enjoyed the snatches of French and Spanish that occasionally drifted in and out on the airwaves.
In summer the house was a very different place. All the windows, except for two very small ones, faced south and the sun streamed in through the open windows. It was warm. Sometimes so warm that we closed the internal wooden shutters across the open windows to give some shade and cool relief. Dogs lay on the roasting flagstones in our doorways, panting but happy, while the cats crept into shady parts of the garden, looking for a just so corner in which to curl away the hot afternoons. All idyllic for a small child like me, playing in the cool clear brook that rippled by our kitchen path, but less so for the grown-ups, who still had work to do.
In later years, as I grew and my brother and sister arrived, the house began to yield many secrets to my inquisitive mother, a born historian and excellent researcher. Likewise Dad, who had virtually no formal education, displayed a strong interest in Law and became surprisingly knowledgeable on the subject. What might he have become in other circumstances? What might any of us have been in another life? We'll never know.

HURTIGRUTEN

We travelled along the Norwegian coast in a Hurtigruten ship which was named after the founder of the service, 'Richard With'. These amazing vessels ply the rocky, island strewn pcoast between the old Hansiatic port of Bergen and the far north industrial town of Kirkenes, near the Russian border on the Barents Sea. They do this twelve months a year. Founded in the early 1800s, Hurtigruten, meaning express route, used to be the official Postal carrier and, even though times have changed, the Company ships still have the honour of flying the Norwegian Postal flag. Nowadays they deliver a wide range of goods to all the principal coastal towns and villages between Bergen and Kirkenes. People use it like a bus and others pjust go along for the ride. The round trip is frequently listed as one of the great travel experiences of the world.
On the sixth day our ship reached the Troll Fjord, a geological wonder some hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.
It is extremely narrow, yet very deep, allowing small ocean-going liners to go in, very carefully.
We arrived at midnight. The Arctic twilight lingered and a bright crescent Moon shone from a clear starlit sky. Our ship slipped in gently on the deep oil dark water, and the sheer, black granite walls on either side towered hundreds of feet above us, so close one felt almost able to reach out and touch them.
Haunting cries of kittiwakes echoed around us, giving the place an unreal atmosphere, as though we were in a film set from Lord of the Rings.
Nearby, two ladies from Lancashire stared at the dripping walls of rock gently sliding by as seabirds wheeled and called above us, their cries echoing from cliff to cliff. Without turning to her companion, one of them said quietly,
"I've 'ad that many anaesthetics I couldn't count. Some of them were OK but others made me sick for hours. It were agony with me stitches, something' shocking'. Some anaesthetics what they give yer are different. I 'ad one, it were a sort of gas. It didn't knock yer out. Yer sort o' knew what was 'appenin' but yer weren't bothered. Before they give it to me one doc said, 'What sort of music would yer like to like to listen to on yer 'eadphones?'
I said Country an' Western, but 'e said 'We 'aven't got no Country and Western, but I got some Tchaikovsky. 'e wrote a good tune. I think he said it was called The Sugar Bum Fairy and asked if that would do would do?'
Really I was passed carin'.
Any'ow, my 'usband, 'e went in to have some of 'is toes off 'cos 'e were walkin' funny. Worked a treat it did. 'e were walkin' straight as a die fer months afterwards, but 'is old trouble come back. 'e wanted the same treatment again, but the consultant told 'im 'e 'adn't got enough toes left to do it no more.
I was 'avin' trouble walkin' at the time. My big toes were givin' me gyp, so I went in an' asked if they could do the same fer me.
'You can't come in 'ere askin' to 'ave yer toes off. That sort of thing 'as to be decided on medical grounds. That's why them surgeons 'as years of expensive trainin'. Anyway, big toes is important. You needs 'em so you don't fall flat on yer face. Your 'usband, 'e 'ad 'is second and fourth toes off 'cos they were jiggered and don't matter anyway. We could 'ave someone look at yer corns, though. 'ow about that?'"
Somehow the magic of the Troll Fjord had passed by these lasses from Lancashire. But no doubt they enjoyed their visit. We did.

Elms ~

My earliest memory of life on the farm is when I was three years old. I was toddling along a cow track in the rough pasture behind the cowsheds with our much loved collie dog called Tuscan. On our way to fetch the cows for milking we passed a pair of giant old elm trees. I knew these two elms in particular because they were twins, towering straight up to the open sky like cathedral pillars. Their branches were as waving tracery, causing the sunlight to sparkle and jig like diamonds of light on rippling sunlit water.
What I loved about them, at such an early age, was that they were joined just above ground level by a massive root. It linked them forever. So they stood only inches apart, their trunks side by side like barrels on a double-barrelled shotgun. Their crowns and canopies, swaying in the breeze high overhead, were home to a noisy colony of cawing rooks. The rooks returned to this, their rookery, every year to patch, repair and rebuild nests lost or damaged in equinox gales.
They often fought each other. Sometimes, unable to fly and fight at the same time, they would crash down through the branches, still scrapping as they hit the ground. Feathers and dust would fly in all directions until, as suddenly as it had started, the ruckus was all over. Stalking off in opposite directions, the two ruffled rooks would give themselves a hurried preen, straighten out ruffled feathers, do a quick check of personal damage and dignity, then flap up rejoin their kith and kin high overhead.
While the protagonists were fighting, neighbours would rob their nests of choice materials to enhance their own domestic structures. Robbing each other was common practice, erupting into full fights only when caught red-handed.
Rooks are truly lords of their manors, and should a buzzard or other opportunist bird of prey stray too near, a flight of rooks will immediately scramble and attack, just as in aerial dogfights. They continue until they have seen the intruders off, usually minus a few tail feathers.
For we ground anchored creatures the rookery was fascinating to watch, a way of timing the year, and very entertaining.
Seventy years later they still are. Time has long ago taken away the rookeries of my childhood, but new generations in different landscapes keep my memories alive and give me great joy.
Elms were beautiful trees. They lent grace, stature and spectacle to most of the British landscape and way beyond years ago. As a small boy I became very aware of the beautiful sound they made. I could see several elms from my bedroom window, and on windy nights I loved to lay in bed with the window open wide to the darkness, listening to the soothing rushing whooshing flow of air's ocean playing through the branches, lulling me to sleep.
Later, in another life in the iconic sixties, disaster struck.
The mighty elms were destroyed, in the space of just a few years, by a tiny beetle which spread what was known as Dutch Elm Disease. To our horror these mighty trees crumpled, one by one, brought down by this small insect, and we watched our treasured English landscape being totally changed, just as villages would be today if all church towers and spires were knocked down, as once happened to a large extent.
There are glimmers of hope that elms may once again grace and dominate our countryside, but sadly not in the lifetimes of most of us.