by A J Selby.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. L P Hartley – The Go-Between
A SHORT walk from my house is a ford over a delightful little river and I pause awhile to watch for any signs of life. Sometimes I see ‘ratty’, the resident water vole, busying himself where the bank meets the flowing water. Today, though, I watch a pair of mallards intermittently quacking and foraging as they paddle against the steady current. Just out of sight I can hear moorhens, too. I bid them farewell and walk across a marshy paddock towards the stand of deciduous trees in the next field.
In fact, there are three fields side by side – the marshy one is lower went, then middle went and upper went. On a neighbouring farm there is a field called ‘Four Wents’, although I am unsure of the etymology of the word ‘Went’. Middle went has recently been under the plough and atop a furrow 20 yards in from the headland I espy a glint of metal reflected by the low winter sun. I hop over the clods and ease the object out of the brown earth, rub it on my sleeve and put it in my jacket poacher’s pocket.
I look up at the trees, which rise away up a short escarpment and note there is a subtle change in the look of the wood – in December the thin, black branch tips were like a crone’s fingers pointing towards the distance, whereas now, with hazel and alder loaded with catkins, and buds imperceptibly swelling, the entire wood has filled out and lightened in colour. At the edge of the wood is an old bench and a huddled figure was sat there taking in the stillness of the day. It was the oldest resident of the village, the ‘old man’ as he is known, well into his 90s but still sharp in mind if slower in movement. I sit down and exchange pleasantries and we speak a little of the turning of another year and the prospects for the spring.

He tells me he was born in the same month as our recently departed monarch and this is his first winter without her. He left school at 13 at the beginning of the war to help on the farm – his father and grandfather before him were head horsemen on the same estate and he planned to follow in their footsteps. In September 1939 the world changed forever. He started the war as a boy and when it was over he was a man, but things were different with tractors replacing the Suffolk Punch horses he was always at one with. The War Ag needed acres ploughed to grow corn and potatoes to feed the nation – a horse could plough an acre a day, a tractor with a two- or three-furrow plough could turn over ten to 15 acres a day.

He paused for a while, resting his elbows on his knees and steepling his fingers, thinking back. Across the field to the village in the late winter silence we heard the church bell ring out the quarters but little else apart from an occasional crow overhead, a ruffle of black feathers against the clear blue sky. I reached into my pocket and told him I had just picked something out of the plough ground in the next field – it was a big horseshoe and his eyes lit up as I passed it to him. He rubbed it between his gnarled fingers and turned it this way and that, and then his eyes glazed over and he quietened as time travelled backwards. I am sure he could hear the two Suffolks pulling the plough, the creak of the thick leather against their giant frames, the rustle of the chains that linked the plough to the harness on their powerful flanks, and the burst of their breath in the cold air like silent pistol shots as these most noble of beasts plodded forward turning over the dark brown sods.

“You know,” he said to me after a while, “until the war I thought it would always be like that. I thought I would work horses and pass the skills to my son and then to his.” I agreed and said that in my own younger farming days only half a century ago I didn’t foresee the changes to come either. Then we talked of modern tractors with huge wheels and even bigger implements, of cows giving twice the milk yield of his day and of the disappearance of so much wildlife. We talked of turtle doves, nightingales and yellowhammers, and a dozen skylarks above the earth, and of the now almost extinct corncrakes in the wheat whose buzzing call would accompany the men as they left the fields in the dusky twilight at the end of their day’s labours.
And there were wildflowers and insects aplenty in the hedgerows, bullfinches scared away from the orchards by young boys, the dung beetles in the meadows and the blood red poppies nodding above the whispering barley in the days before herbicides. He was thinking back to his youth and harder but simpler times as was I in another era but again, so different to today. As I bade
him a good morning to continue my ramble a thought came to me: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”