Happy Days and Heartbreak Days: A Farmer's Son Relives His 1920s Childhood [Paperback]

AFTER Victor Dilworth drove by chance through the village where he was born in the 1920s, he started to recall his earliest memories of life on the family farm, Hinstock Grange. In his retirement, as he concentrated on these recollections, they became so real that it felt as though he had been reborn into those times and was actually reliving his experiences.

Describing long-gone sights, sounds, smells and emotions, he employs a turn of phrase so evocative and exact that reading this book is like watching a vivid video being played in the mind, ‘filmed’ through the eyes of a toddler and small boy. The scenes are set in his native Shropshire and also Cheshire, where he visits the farm and watermill where his father was brought up.

The youngest of the family (‘the scratching of the pot’), Victor finds that his hard-working parents have little time for him until he can do some useful work. Affection comes from his big sister, his grandfather and his beloved dog, Rover. Always anxious to learn, he watches the family milking cows, making prize-winning cheese and tending the many animals. He sees lambs being born and under threat of a whack from the cow strap he refrains from touching the baby chicks as they emerge from their shells in the incubator. He helps the farm waggoner to oil the horse-drawn mowing machine and accompanies his father to feed the sheep, on a float pulled by Dolly the pony. He learns about the cycle of life and death on the farm and comes to realise "that all creatures on earth are dependent on each other, just like the strands of a spider’s web suspended on a hedgerow in the autumn."

He sets off to school just before his fourth birthday, full of trepidation about the unknown outside world.

I’m now in my eighties but still young at heart. This book is about my memories as a small boy who was born into a Shropshire farming family. My father had been married before he met my mother so I had two stepbrothers, Charles and Bert. Their mother had died at the time of Bert’s birth. When our father married my mother they started a second family: my sister Muriel was first, followed by Harold, then Cyril and me six years later. I always say I am the scratching of the pot.

There was always a good warm feather bed and wholesome food – boiled potatoes and carrots, roast or boiled beef followed by farmhouse rice pudding, not forgetting home-made apple pies and the like. What we all enjoyed were Mother’s fruit cake and crusty pork pies. Most of the food we had was produced on the farm.

When I finished my schooling I went to work as an agricultural engineer; perhaps I was tired of farming. As the farm was only a hundred acres, my father said it would be better if I went and got my own living, for there were plenty of hands at home.

So why not share my days of happiness and heartbreak with me?

"My early working life was in agricultural engineering and tractors. In the 1940s I was employed as a depot manager for a company distributing Ferguson tractors and their implements in mid Wales. One day a gentleman from Ferguson’s Head Office called and said he had news for me. Ferguson was setting up a new distributorship for South Northants and I had been selected to establish the depot, sales and service. I was twenty six years of age and I thought maybe too young for this responsibility but the gentleman had complete confidence in my ability. That is how I arrived in Northampton in 1948.

"After living in a hotel for a few weeks I was told to contact a lady who lived near the depot and might have a room available where I could live as part of the family. This I did and in doing so met my future wife Olive, who was one of her daughters. Olive had not long been demobbed from the Air Force after serving in North Africa and Rome. We married in 1951 and settled in Northampton, raising three boys and continuing my agricultural career.

"I had a small factory in Hardingstone making sheep races, cattle crushers and general agricultural equipment. It was there in the 1950s that I invented a modification to hydraulic valves for tractors which has since become a standard fitment worldwide.

"After many years in farming, profitability and returns were at a very low point. Needing to earn we eventually decided to form a new company called Westone Heating and Ventilation, installing industrial heating. This venture proved to be very profitable for it was at the time of the new factory developments in Northampton during the 1970s. We also found work countrywide.

"The children were in education and the extra cash-flow enabled us to give them every support. Olive was a mother to us all and also took on the role of company secretary for the firm.

"In the 1980s I retired and we went to live on Anglesey, North Wales, for a while. As we couldn’t settle we came back to be near the boys in Northampton.

"I took an interest in local affairs and joined Boothville Community Council, becoming Chairman for three years in the 1990s.

"After my wife had a stroke in 1989 I nursed her until her death a year ago in 2002, filling any spare odd moments in writing and working on this book about my early life on my old family farm in Shropshire."