Flies
at the window.
Some
fifty years ago we had an old uncle who died alone in his house and no one
found him until two weeks had gone by.
Uncle
Jack was father’s younger brother, he never got married and lived at home on
the farm with his own father and his step mother, he did the day to day running
the farm. As his father (my grandfather) got older and not capable of any work
my father Charlie went across with his tractor doing a bit of ploughing and
harvesting work to help keep things going.
When
grandfather died , in the late 1940’s it became apparent the Jack had no desire
to continue with the farm, so the farm was sold up and he came to live with us
at The Beeches. He had his own room and had his meals at the table with our
family increasing the work load that mother had to cope with, (seven of us
round the table every day for meals). As you can imagine mother was not too
impressed with that idea but she went along with it for about two years, during
which time he worked for his brother Charlie on our farm.
Eventually
Jack got a job at the town’s sewage works, where it turned out, he was the only one who could use a scythe (before the days of strimmers) to
keep the whole site clear of long grass and weeds round the filter beds. At the
same time he bought his own house in town a terraced house, where father used
to go and see him most weekends.
Two
or three years on.-- This one weekend when father went to see Jack he could not
raise him by knocking on the front door or ringing the bell, and thought he
must be out shopping or summat. Next weekend came and the same thing happened
and thought that’s strange, so went round the block of houses up an entry to
Jack’s back door, which was latched but not locked.
On
entering he found his brother collapsed on the floor dead, he had obviously
been there for over a week and possibly two weeks. He was not a very talkative
man and would not mix with his neighbours very well, and being brought up on a
farm you never had close neighbours (shoulder to shoulder so to speak) in his
life like you do in terraced houses.
All
the authorities were told and investigations found he had died of natural
causes, but it only goes to prove how important neighbours are, who, had he got
to know them, might have looked in well before my father did.
In
the 1970’s I had a scare with my neighbour Reg, that’s the neighbouring farm. I
was carting small bales of straw (big bales had not been invented in our part
of the world then) and two field back away from the road Reg had driven his
combine twice round the field of corn and was stopped with the engine running
with a slight blue puffs of smoke from the exhaust. And hour later it had not
moved so I unhitched and shot off round the lanes to see what had happened to
him.
He
lived and worked on his own and nearly always had his brother come to help at
harvest time, but this day he had not come. So pulling up in a great hurry, I startled
Reg who had broken a section on his blade and dare not stop the engine as it
had not got a good enough battery to be reliable. I explained what I had seen
from the distance, thinking he had fallen off the top of the combine or fallen
onto the header and reel, you see it was one with no cab. However it was great relief
to see he was okay, and he was pleased to know I had noticed and acted as I
did.
It
was around that area that a farmer who lived on his own, other side of town to
us, one evening was getting out his potato harvester out, servicing and
greasing it ready for the seasons work. He was found the following day, the
tractor still running and the potato harvester being run by its power take off (PTO)
and him underneath jammed in the tines and rotating machinery not able to get
out and died before he was found.
All
this was brought back to mind last week when I had got up around 7am and opened
the upstairs curtains, and started to do a bit of work on the computer. You see
I am in my retirement house in the middle of the village and having all the
farm records and other stuff which had got to be retained for a few years I commandeered
the small front bedroom as my office.
Normally,
I would have gone down stairs and opened the front curtains, but the day I got engrossed
in writing (a bit like I am doing now) and stuck at it and lost the sense of
time. Then to bring me back to from my thinking, there came a loud knocking on
the front door and the door bell ringing, it was 9am. It was a young lady from
down the road who was just taking her two children to the village school and
noticed my front room curtains still closed, and on her way back came to see if
I was okay. Jumping up from the computer I opened the upstairs window and
looked out to see her looking at me with great relief, “Are you alright” she
called, then I had to tell her how grateful I was, and nice to know I had got such
very good neighbours who would notice things out of the ordinary, and act on
the spur of the moment.
There
is a chap named Dan who owns and manages a large herd of milking cows, they now
run over the land I gave up a couple of years ago, a number of farms being
amalgamated to make a big dairy unit.
I get on very well with him, I offer him
advice and he in his modern unit thinking ignores it in a tongue in cheek sort
of way, he always tells me he is keeping an eye on me, every time he runs up
the village (quite a few time every day from one unit to the other) on his quad
bike or on the tractor he looks to see the curtains have been opened.
I in turn told him that “dunna leave it till windows
are full of sodin flies as that would be too bloody late”.
It
is very reassuring to know that I have very good neighbours, my daughter and Barry only lives a couple of hundred yards/metres down the road by the church,
so I feel very comfortable among a village full of good folk.
Owd Fred
Laws are spider webs through which
the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
Honore de Balzac (1790 – 1850)
