Family, feathered friends... and logs

WMN nostalgia writer David Hill, tempted out of retirement by inspiration during lockdown, has written three more prose-poems recalling his 1950s childhood

The Nethercott Family

NETHERCOTT with its seventeenth century farmhouse was where my mother and I cycled annually to visit relatives on my mother’s side. Great-Uncle George and Great-Aunt Emily were permanently old in my young eyes. Not great in any way, as far as I could tell, both small in stature and in girth.

Above the farm court wheeling swallows skimming the cloud waves, as we were met and greeted by Great-Aunt’s smiling face, her pink cheek proffered for a kiss. Great-Uncle’s finger-crunching handshake. Into the kitchen, other rooms saved for festive days and Sundays. A glass case trophy of a room with taxidermy filled cabinets of partridge, snipe and pheasant. All shot by Great-Uncle George. Great-Aunt Emily’s laughter at the dinner table, “‘E likes ‘em stuffed. To my mind though, my stuffin’ is the best. Yer ‘ave another slice o’ breast.” A home made afters, topped with her annual joke,” Yer ‘ave another spoonful, you’ve only ‘ad a trifle.”

Great-Uncle’s metal puzzles and his riddles, many repeated on each visit. That year a new one with an upturned matchbox placed upon the table. “There’s four pies in a box, now how can five boys ‘ave one each?” I’m mystified. The box turned over, the maker’s name revealed- PIONEER. His chuckle, “One lad ‘ad the pie on ‘ere.” GreatAunt’s farewell kiss, a shiny coin pressed into my palm. Her gnarled fingers closing my hand over it.

“A florin for ‘e, ‘n’ us be savin’ our pennies for yer special gift. Through the post on Christmas Day, a small package, red wax sealed. Two white handkerchiefs initialled in the corner, with blue thread

The Thursday after the cycle trip. A market day treat bus trip to visit the Great-Uncle’s aged mother and his sister. Ester and the chuckling Carrie in their terraced house. An account of our visit to the farm. “My daughter-in-law’s a good plain cook. George married well, ‘e won’t die hungry.” A loud laugh from her daughter as she riddled the coal and chopped-log fire. On our leaving, a sixpenny bit handed from the mother to her daughter with a gentle nod in my direction.

Arriving home, my mother and my aunt sharing a whispered conversation. “A shame that ‘er’s a little lackin’. Always ‘ave been to my knowledge.” I was mystified. We’d had a good roast dinner, the fire kept well stoked, money for an ice cream and her daughter always chuckling. What could she possibly be lacking?

Each April

EACH April the returning. First an outrider. Over the ensuing days, the builders in a proliferation above the cobbled front court. Saucer-dishes and upturned bee skeps, beaked and crafted from mud pellets, as if in an overnight mushroom sprouting. Old ones repaired, the patches in different earth shades, spittle-moist.

All summer long they threw themselves into the sky, as exuberant as the last day of term playground school boys, their excitement knowing no bounds from dawn ‘til dusk. The nests were shrines, their occupants treated with reverence. A fear that should any harm befall the summer pilgrims there would be blood in the milk, or hens would cease to lay. Throughout my childhood, the nests on barn wall and cob-walled shed rafter increased in number until there were over two dozen.

A turn-twist above the newly mown hay meads. Plucking out insects. The air a bursting of song bubbles, a tuning fork tail and the telegraph wires all of a hum as the maestros gathered for their end of summer exodus concert. A death foretold in the parish by their end of day twittering. Next morning they were gone. Sky over mead and court empty. The sudden departure alarming. The September leaving with the first leaf falling, the smell of autumn in the air. And the swallows and martins just a memory until the following April.

The log stores

MY grandad was a wood-pile builder without equal in my young eyes, when it came to stacking split logs in his tiny shed, up three steps behind the mid terraced house. His farmer-son with tractor drawn trailer delivering a load to the front door which opened out on the A361 running through the market town.

Logs tipped out on the pavement, carried carefully over the daily scrubbed step, through the house into the backyard under Gran’s ever watchful beady eye. “Burn ash green, fit for a queen. Burn it dry for you and I.” His maxim with shirt sleeves rolled, hands lined and calloused lifted each log as if it were a chosen stone and he was once again constructing a fine Devon dry stone wall.

Barely a gap big enough between each one for a mouse to crawl through. His look at me and his yearly adage - “Practice makes perfect. Patience. That’s the way to build a stack.” Logs packed away, sleeves rolled down. A glass of cider poured. My father on the other hand, with his bowsaw in back court sawed up his logs into eight inch lengths, wheel barrowing them to the pound house, no longer used for pulping and pressing. The logs tumbling in a sprawl across the earth tamped floor. A heap from a beech hedge laid every ten years, and a dead apple tree. “As long as they’m in the dry. Two years and they’ll be on the fire. One for heat and t’other for its scent.”

Neatly stacked or just thrown in, the logs in both sheds warmed the rooms in winter.