Subject: Looking back.

Looking back one has to admit that when we were young our knowledge of our parents and their lives was pretty sketchy. In those days communication with them was within four walls or outside those four walls with friends outside the family. Another of the things which limited the sense of genuine interaction was that I was an only child and lacked the camaraderie of a sibling relationship. When I see and hear the banter between my own kids I realise what I missed. Anyway one progressed on those twin tracks, adult choice which in our house was rich and diverse alongside the benefit of living and growing in a village surrounded by “space”. Woods and coppice, rivers and streams, paths leading to hidden places which our childish ignorance could make magical.

The seasons were reflected in mother nature which we saw first hand.

Winter, the dark mornings and early evenings, the pared back foliage and the fragility of life for the creatures around us. Spring, that marvellous reawakening, the blossoms and new shoots on the branches, fresh life in the fields as lambs appeared, the daffodils and the bluebells carpeting the pathway which only a month before had seemed so bleak. The farmer hoeing and planting, up hill and down dale, I was especially fortunate to see the last of the great majestic ‘Shire Horses’ pulling a plough, the jingle of their harness and the commands of the farmer as he followed the furrow. The squealing of piglets and the grunt of their mother as we changed their soiled straw bedding in the pigsty, no issues about health and safety in those days or when we wandered around in the milking shed at milking time. Summer and the cutting of the barely or wheat by the combined harvester, spitting out the bundles of hay to be stacked as the harvester made its way across the field, we kids trailing along with pitch forks to organise the stacking. H & S  would have been apoplectic but I can’t remember one accident. Autumn and the seasons turn again and nature begins to prepare for the vagaries of winter. This was as much the backdrop of our lives as school, we learnt first hand of danger not by confiscating it but respecting it for what it was.

The slow maturation of life at home, learning the essence of our mother and fathers distillation of what they thought appropriate. The appreciation of music and politics, culture and manners, the good and the bad. There were no distractions, no television, no internet, no chat lines only the hand me downs of conversations from an older generation. But always the 'great outdoors' beckoned which sadly today kids is mostly out of bounds made so by the protective screen parents erect and maintain until the child has given way to adolescence and it's too late for the child to imagine for themselves, what lies around the corner.