When I Was Young And Lived On A Farm

I left school when I was fifteen and have worked every year since. I lived and worked on a farm, I met my wife Jennifer when I was seventeen, and we got married when I was nineteen, and we have now been married for forty-nine years. We have four grown-up kids and eight wonderful grandchildren, I have never regretted getting married at a young age, In fact, quite the opposite. Our married life with four young children living on a farm was wonderful.

My childhood memories of being brought up on a farm in the sixties were a magical experience imprinted into my mind forever. I was Seven when my dad put me into the driving seat of a small Ford Dexter tractor, with a trailer of hay out in the fields feeding the cattle, my Dad put the tractor into gear, jumped off leaving me to steer around the fields allowing him to jump onto the trailer and cut the bales, and leave a nice line of hay with cattle feeding. The sight of cattle lined up behind the trailer feeding is a sight that I shall never forget.

Those captivating moments from my childhood have become memories that have stayed with me throughout my life, each morning as the sun began to rise, my dawn chorus was the sounds of cattle mooing, sheep baaing, and chickens cackling, and of course, the crows leaving the trees where they had been roosting for the night. Every morning around September time, I remember walking the fields before school picking mushrooms for breakfast, with my little penknife to cut the stalks to leave the root of the spore to grow another year, there was always an abundance of mushrooms at that time of the year.

We had no electricity in those days, just a generator my dad had to start just before it got dark and stop the next morning as the daylight broke. we had no television, no fridge, and no cooker. The only heating was an open fire in the front room that got used at Christmas time. My mum used to do all the cooking on a Rayburn aga type of thing in the kitchen, where we mostly lived, that consisted of a wood and coal fire an oven and a hotplate on the top, for the saucepans and the kettle that was always boiling. Mum had three old flat irons, that were always there to keep the doors open in the summer when she wanted to do the ironing, they were always on the hotplate getting hot when she remembered to use a cloth to pick them up.

As I have grown older, I have realised how lucky I have been to have experienced those times, living a simple and uncomplicated life, and enjoying the natural pleasures of nature. These days the only tractor I drive is a sit-on mower cutting my daughter's grass all two acres of it, but I still feel that sense of pride in knowing that I have made a positive impact in my life, planting and growing, and caring for the land as it was years ago.

Time does move much faster now than it did when I was a child, with all the computer games and social networking, and when I hear my grandchildren complain when there is no wifi and they can't get a signal on their phone, you would think that their world has come to an end. I try to remind them that there is more to life than just screens and technology, and to go outside and use their imagination and appreciate the simple moments that nature offers, but in reality, they just want their screens. Have these technological advancements just made their lives more convenient or allowed them to lose their imagination?