Happy Days and Heartbreak Days: A Farmer's Son Relives His 1920s Childhood (Paperback)

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.

From the Author
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?

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