‘Wash Day’ to ‘Mowhay’ – childhood in verse
WMN writer DAVID HILL celebrates growing up on a Devon farm in the 50s in a a series of new poems
AS I near the end of ten years of writing about my childhood on the North Devon family farm (my farmhouse tree) in the 1950s, a selection of poems. One about Monday washday, which is about my mother and my aged maiden aunt, Aunt Nell, who have both regularly featured in my articles. Two about three great aunts who haven’t. One about books. Two about gates – one indirectly about Aunt Nell, one indirectly about my father. One about the mowhay which again is indirectly about my father. Finally, one written in the Japanese tanka form about cider and poems.
WASH DAY
“Twas on a Monday morning That I beheld my darling, She looked so neat and charming In every high degree. She looked so neat and nimble-o, A-washing of her linen-o.”
Words sung with gusto around the piano. Sheet music illuminated by candles in brass holders on the upright front. Each Monday morning the song acted out in back kitchen, at first around the pump trough, copper and the wood and iron mangle.
In the early fifties, two grey Calor gas cylinders installed. A boiler and an iron purchased, both powered by a bright blue flame. The drudgery of the washday made more bearable with the old items consigned to the corner of the outhouse.
At the end of the afternoon the large double cotton sheets picked in, the gipsy lady crafted clothes pegs placed in the hessian bag tied around my waist. Next, mother and my aged maiden aunt who lived with us, performed their washday dance. Stepping up to each other and smiling broadly,
each grasped two corners of a sheet. Taking two quick steps back they pulled it taut. Shaken up and down and all about in a white-billow flap. Moving forward, the partners faced each other once again. The sheet folded over with my aunt passing her part to my mother, who completed the jig.
My aunt retreated a couple of steps and unpegged the second sheet. Facing each other for the second dance. Step, step, close up the second sheet. At the end of the performance the wicker basket carried proudly back into my farmhouse tree for the final act in the washday ritual.
“Dashing away with the smoothing iron, Dashing away with the smoothing iron, Dashing away with the smoothing iron, They stole my heart away.”
A GREAT AUNT
The old lady, lived across the valley from our farm. Her house viewed through the branches of the beech trees in back court, with three bedrooms was, in my spatially-unaware developed brain, a doll’s house. Each Christmas and each summer, the customary visits
for a grand tea in her parlour. The silver tea set, highly polished, best china, linen serviettes. In my mind, filled with a Grimm’s tale from a Birthday present, an illustrated volume, the little lady, all in black became a witch. Her oven the place she put children in, to satisfy her cannibalistic ways.
Using the handed down initialled tongs, I dropped sugar-bomb cubes into my tea, splash marks on the crocheted table cloth. A withering look from the great aunt. My appetite lost afraid she’d cast her abracadabra magic spell, I declined her offers of fancies, meringues, lemon curd and raspberry jam tarts.
Across the room a mahogany sideboard with a dozen mirrors set into the frame, reflecting my face back into a large mirror behind my head which bounced it back again. Staring back at me, numerous faces in each of the mirrors. Afraid I’d be imprisoned In looking glass world, I asked to be excused, and I rushed into her garden.
At the end of my visit a sixpenny bit pressed into my hand for an ice cream tub, her fingers shaking as they had done when she’d pored the tea. Over the years the shakes became more violent, her body frail. No longer a witch she pottered out her days, baking gingerbreads for relatives who occasionally visited.
POINTS OF THE COMPASS
Westacott, East Knowstone, South Molton, North Devon, four cardinal
points on my Christmas cracker compass, was the address of two great aunts. On the front wall of their house a plaque dated 1895. A laugh from my aunt Nell, when I asked her if it was the birthday of one of the old ladies.
The first house where I made an overnight stay, aged four with my small blue case and teddy bear. Their flushing lavatory, the first one in the village, pulling the chain, a cascade of spring water crashing down from the iron cistern. At Christmas their pudding gift from the handed down recipe.
A bookcase stacked with hardback volumes large and small, His First Term and The Swiss Family Robinson, both with coloured plates, also books of knowledge for my enquiring mind. Two wall mounted display cases with taxidermy mounts of a dipper and a chaffinch.
On a wall above the foot pedal harmonium, played at Christmas, my hands in a giggle pressing them. A head and shoulders in pen and ink, framed sketch of William Ewart Gladstone. On the back, a signed hand-written for the strong Liberal supporting family.
One aunt, a servant of the parish, brought you into the world and a later date, prepared you for your journey into the next. The local organisers of the National Friendly Society, collecting a weekly half a crown, and paying out a small amount in times of sickness and personal hardship.
Items of haberdashery sold to villagers from a cupboard, one room set aside each month for the doctor’s surgery. A paddock at the top of the garden where their pig was reared, throat cut and salted down, porcine delights, the bladder saved for me to be turned into a football by my father.
The two Sunday school teachers of the children of the parish were my lodestone. Their weekly chapel lessons, my compass pointing and guiding me in the right direction, their bearings followed throughout my life. The housing never broken, the ordinal directions recalled.
BOOKS
The books on the shelf, next to the solitaire game, were few in number. Encyclopaedias on agriculture, general knowledge and household hints, an Edgar Rice thriller, Oliver Twist, Fireside Amusements, Foulshams Fun, prayer books and hymn books
Ancient and Modern for C of E and Methodists.
One prayer book a gift to my mother on her twenty-second birthday, with a tiny purse set in the cover for her Sunday service collection coin. Another volume, 1875, my paternal grandmother’s, who had died sixteen years before I was born. A tiny volume, clenched-fist thick, with minute faded print.
Pride of place next to the black Bakelite telephone was a family Bible, its thick board cover embossed, and the fourteen hundred pages wellthumbed. With the other books it was guarded over by my father’s double barrel shotgun resting in the mahogany rack fixed to the wall above the shelf.
The heavy tome, my paternal grandfather’s who had died in 1921 was an attendance prize, inscribed on the fly leaf in copper plate – “To Thomas Hill aged twelve, August 1875. A reward from Always End Sunday School,” four miles away. Interspersed between the pages a collection of mementoes – funeral cards, my mother’s confirmation card, a sheet of paper with my name on and words for the Sunday school anniversary recitation I had given that summer. Each night the Bible carefully carried upstairs by my mother, the verses read beneath the candle light, after she had said her prayers.
Taken down at breakfast time, after her morning prayers, the Bible was replaced and she could begin her day. Stories read to me of an evening, a coat of many colours, a baby in the rushes, a strong man. Hearing strange words, enjoying the cadences, the rhythms; seeds sown to be harvested and stored in my granary.
THE CREAKING GATE
Just inside the gate, a garden shed with the front open to the elements, was approached by crossing the three feet square slate slab over the stream running through the farm. The gate was old, but as my father often said,
“The creaking gate will hang the longest Nell,” whenever my aunt, His older sister, began to speak about her aches and pains.
There was always the scent of box in the shed, the garden hedges trimmed and shaped with sheep shears, after the summer grass had Been cut and carried. Over the garden the scent of sweet peas In the long row, mingling with the leaves of boy’s love when crushed between finger and thumb.”The old hedge smells like cat’s pee,” said my aunt as she cut a bunch of sweet peas, five blooms to a stem.
The tools in the shed had been handed down from father to son, handles of ash, a patina of dried sweat accentuating the grain. Cleaned and oiled at the end of the harvest, the tools propped against the wall. Spade, fork, digger, hoe and rake. One spring a male Jenny wren built a nest on an upturned rake. Left for a week, unlined, what my father called “the false nest,” it was carefully removed and buried in the garden.
In the ‘ood rick, in a beech faggot, the true nest, feather-lined and six nestlings successfully reared. In the garden a bumper harvest of vegetables gathered, tools cleaned, oiled and stacked in the shed until the following spring. Two years after my father’s death, the wrens continued nesting in the rick or in crevices between stones in the back court wall, and my aunt continued to complain of being in ill health long after the gate had been replaced.
THE MEAD GATE
The five bar gate leading into Higher Mead, laid up for hay each spring, was a sound and solid structure to keep stock in and strangers out. Crafted opposite in the carpenter and wheelwright’s shop – F Newton and Son. Butt carts, long carts with ladies, ladders, gates, hand rakes, handles for farm and garden tools. Mr Newton’s cryptic riddle. “Best oak for the job they’ll all need doing. The job that the owner will never see completed and for which he or she will never pay me personally for doing.”
Filling my nostril, the scent from recently sawn wood as strong as that of the fox passing under the lower bar of the gate at dawn, through dew drenched grass, to his earth in Beer Close copse. My tiny fingers stroking the wood, tracing the rings, working out the age of the ancient tree, as I had been taught by my father when he felled the ash tree struck in two by lightning. “Burn ash green, fit for a queen,. Burn it dry for you and I.”
The gate, decades old, granite grey, and lichen-coated with pinhead yellow specks in sunburst clusters, was hung at the back of a post wedged in a hole. Firmly tamped in with earth and stones, so as to clearly the ground with just a couple of inches to spare. My height measured out each spring with a nail-scratched mark, his chuckle and the annual words, “Growing up again not down. That’s good. Two inches since last. Remember now, no swinging on it, and if you ever have to climb over it, use the hinge end not the ‘apse end.”
By clambering on to the lower bar I could emulate his leaning on the top bar, cogitating stance, as we chewed on our stems of grass. Arms resting on the gate looking out over meads and moors. In my mind today, echoes of the clicking mower blade through the hay mead swamped with summer wild flowers. Recalling the scent of chamomile crushed by hoof and boot, harvest picnics in the shade of the corrugated iron shed and the unfathomable words of the carpenter as he planed the final plank.
THE MOWHAY
At the top of Long Halls field, tucked away in a corner the mowhay where my father and his father built and thatched their ricks, before the winter threshing of sheaves, harvested and carted from fields across the road: Lower Down, Higher Down, Hither Six, Outer Six And Four Acres. At the end of each harvest the ritual of Crying the Neck, when the final ribboned sheaf was nailed to the granary door. A thank you for the barley, wheat and oats gathered, and a prayer that next year’s crop would be as good. After sixteen years of sowing, my father’s seed sown one December night producing an heir to roam his fields. In the mowhay old implements, discarded when my father in his forties through ill health and war dictates, was forced to rent out five of his grass fields.
Beneath a parliament of cawing rooks which nested annually in beech trees where our seven milking cows gathered in the lew of the hedge, an express train and a rocket from the iron drags, to transport me across the country side, or far out into deepest space. Thoughts of farming far from my imaginative mind.
He never sold the rusting implements, living in the hope I would one day take over the inherited family farm and house, little altered from the day it had been constructed out of cob. On his death, his Michaelmas son, a farming quarter day baby, watched as the rusting implements we’re knocked down for a bob, a job lot, scrap to the one and only bidder. My father’s mowhay empty.
A FULL TANKA(RD)
Apples pressed and pulped, the hogsheads full to the brim with amber liquid; on printed pages, poems to be picked and then enjoyed.