AN AGE WHEN TRACTORS RUMBLED DOWN THE STREET

AN age when tractors rumbled down the street, a time when flocks of sheep could often be seen spilling on to the pavement and the sight of a farm worker carrying a freshly-caught pike home for his tea… these were once familiar scenes in a 1950s English village. Long before the Chelsea tractor and their green-wellied drivers would sweep down the lanes, a period when Laura Ashley wallpaper and corn dollies had yet to arrive in the farm labourer’s cottage, and when the elms were still standing like soldiers at regular intervals in the hedgerows before being cut down by armies of fungus-carrying beetles… yes, the English village was once a very different place. Beef Cubes and Burdock harks back to a time when the word ‘dormitory’ was only used to describe the sleeping arrangements at a boarding school rather than prefixing a place of habitation… when the vast majority of a village’s inhabitants either worked on the land or cycled to the factory in the nearby town. This collection of sketches catalogues and describes in great detail what it meant to experience a village childhood. The passage of the seasons, the games we played, the adventures of make-believe when an old ruined mill might suddenly be transformed into Davy Crockett’s Alamo by legions of whooping children who couldn’t decide whether they were still pirates or Red Indians from the previous game… and the endless circle of farm work in an age when children found excitement in everyday, mundane activities such as potato picking, haymaking and helping with the harvest. Swimming in the river, fishing for sticklebacks and occasionally larger quarry, rearing orphaned birds, inedible school meals, formidable teachers with skirts that billowed like the sails of Spanish galleons, scrumping apples and sometimes getting caught by the policeman, being lulled to sleep on summer nights by the sound of distant sheep and cattle... this was the reality of my long-lost village childhood. Beef Cubes and Burdock shines a light into a small corner of a golden era, a time of innocence before a rural England became urbanised by motorways, housing overspill and millionaire professionals living their very own tailor-made personal pastoral fantasies.

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