Once we had a shepherd with a glass eye, who used to go down to the water race, where it flowed between the apple trees, to wash – every now and then he took out his eye and rinsed it in the water. I remember one day I crept up behind him, and sprang upon his stooping back; he was thrown off balance, and we both fell sprawling in the water – his glass eye fell from
his hand, and was smashed on a stone. He never bothered to have it replaced, and anyway, he said he could see just as well without it.
More and more memories crowded into my mind as I sat thinking of those far off days, and as I relived each one I was a child again, feeling every emotion with the utmost clarity. There was the day that John fell down the gravel pit, and I could see his small figure crumpled and motionless at the bottom, and thought he was dead. I flew round the edge to the sloping
track, crying and praying as I ran, “Oh God please don't let him be dead”, and my relief when my efforts to move him were rewarded with a howl of pain. There was the day Gillian was chased by a bull, and took refuge on the top of a huge stone heap in the middle of a paddock and there had to remain with the bull pacing about below her, until she was rescued hours later by one of the farm hands. The time Beth had her wrist broken when she was dragged by her pony. She was driven by my mother to the nearest Doctor – a matter of twenty-five miles, a pale frightened little girl, feint with pain as the trap bumped over the rough country roads. Very different, I remembered, when she returned a few days later, a little superior I thought, with her arm in a sling, and wearing a new red ribbon in her shining dark curls.
Another memory was of an early morning just as I was leaving the house, when one of the men had fallen under the disc harrows when his horse had taken fright, and was being carried in. He was horribly cut about the face and arms – I tottered into the garden and was suddenly sick.
During those first years the development of the farm went on steadily, though there were many heart-braking setbacks. Crops were sewn and harvested, and the sheep and cattle increased in number, as did the employees. The mortgage was paid off, and there was money in the bank, and help in the house for my mother, and it was about this time, when I was five, that my father decided to take a trip home to England; my mother and
the two youngest children, the baby Jane, were all chosen(?) to go with him. I was broken-hearted when I found I was to be(?) left behind with my grandparents; it was the first time I had ever stayed away from home, or been separated from the rest of the family.
The four older girls were to stay with different friends.
The months of waiting for their return seemed endless and when from time to time one of my sisters came to visit me I became homesick and miserable. Living with my grandparents were two young aunts, and an unmarried uncle – Uncle James, my idol. He was gay and handsome, a young man who should have been an artist, just as his brother William should have studied music – music that filled his heart and mind and made him forget his sheep.
Their father was a dour Scot who had no time for the Arts. The boys, he said, should be farmers, so he bought them each a farm, but they were not interested. The one played his music, and the other made his pictures, and wasted his time watching a falling blossom, or a bright bird in a sparkling pool.
Uncle James often took me on the front of his saddle when he went out, and it was he who first taught me beauty of form and colour, and of light and shade, and I spent many happy hours with him. He showed me the loveliness of a windblown tree against a darkening sky, and of a bright green lizard basking on a flat grey stone in the sun. It was he too who kept me out too long one evening when we were overtaken by a storm. The wind came sweeping across the plain in unbroken violence, tearing at our clothes and beating the breath out of our lungs.
It became impossible to stay on the horse, so we dismounted, tied the reins to the stirrup, and set him free knowing he would find his own way home. We struggled along, clinging tightly to each other, and I knew that if he let me go, I would be blown away like a leaf. Every now and again he would
hoist me up and carry me until I had recovered my breath. When we got home, and I felt we had been through a great adventure together, he was roundly scolded by my grandmother, but he laughed and made light of it – as he did on the fatal day when he cut my hair short. It seemed a good idea to us,
but it made us very unpopular with the rest of the household.
At last, after what seemed a lifetime to me, my parents were on their way home, and I was going to Littleton to meet their ship. When I got there with one of my aunts, I found my four sisters already there, and when I saw my mother and father coming down the gangplank, I was suddenly shy. I noticed John was taller and thinner, and that Jane, in my mother's arms, had a bandage over her eyes. Later I learned that she had picked up some infection in England, which in spite of several operations and left her almost blind in one eye. She spent months in semi-darkness, then had to wear tinted glasses for many months more.
As she grew older it was found that she was artistic, and in spite of her impaired sight she painted many beautiful pictures.
Quickly the threads of our old life were taken up again, except that John and I started to go to school. Our days of unrestricted play were over; gone the hours of dawdling through the leafy orchard and playing by the water race amongst the yellow buttercups, with the unforgettable smell
of musk all about us. Instead we bustled off to make the(?) mile ride to school, splashing through the water where the stream became a shallow ford across the roadway.
Pip and Dot were our ponies, and in the winter when the
water was frozen, Dot refused to walk on the ice, so Pip went before her, pawing the surface until he made a hole in which he put his hoof; more pawing, and another hole, and so on, step by step until the ford was crossed, with Dot following sedately behind, carefully walking in the holes
made for her.
Roger, this is lovely, and so good to have photographs. Margan told me the ride to school was ten miles each way, they had to swim their ponies over the river, and there was a hitching rail outside the school where everybody tied their ponies while they were in school. One of those two Uncles was so handsome, with great dark eyes, he was known locally as J.C. because people thought he looked like Jesus. Love, Nonie x
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