HOBNAIL BOOTS PART TWO

One January night the first snowfall of winter,in a blizzard-blitz unheralded,bombarded my farmhouse tree coating the courts and fields in its cold white mantle.In the morning we went to the corrugated iron roofed hayshed,tar-coated in July by summer visiting gipsies  encamped on moorland where villagers held commoner's grazing rights.

      Watching him kneel and with his iron hay-knife,the blade fifteen inches long,honed to a silver sharpness,slice out a wedge of summer with which to feed his five Red Ruby steers.Watching his shoulders heave and shudder with the strain,hands plunging the blade deep into the stack releasing the scent of sun filled summer days.In a blast the sweet intoxicating aroma awakening memories of tossing grass stalks high into the air,of turning cartwheels and rolling in the windrows raked ready for the sweep.

       And all through the harvest  his hobnails tramping forward,turn and back again.Turn,forward and back again.

         The summer bundle roped and carried on his back.Trudging through snow to the middle of the mead to stock haughty with a head toss of impatience.Half stumbling by his side,eager to keep up.Small impressions of my Wellington boots almost level with his prints.

        The cattle fed,we turn and head for home.Carrying me piggy- back.Almost losing his balance with the exertion and my weight.Dropping me into the stack,breathless.With a laugh his finger pointing at two sets of footprints outward bound,but only one set returning.

         For several weeks after his death the hobnails remained in a corner on the stone flag floor inside the door where he had cast them off that afternoon.When last we'd stepped out together,I covered and filled his prints in the mud,but I could never fill his boots.Always the follower,never the farmer.

THE PAIR OF HOBNAIL BOOTS.

My father was the custodian of my farmhouse tree.He was born in it and he died in itDuring the sixty two years he was only away from his own bed for seven nights,when he was away on his honeymoon.

     He was a gentle man finding beauty in the flowers and birds of the hedgerow.The following piece is about his hobnail boots and is in two parts.Part one today.Part two next time.

                                                   HOBNAIL BOOTS...PART ONE.

Inside the farmhouse tree back door,crafted in the carpenter and wheelwright's shop,seldom bolted with the iron bar forged in the smithy; both buildings opposite front court,a pair of boots.Leather hobnails soled with studs carefully tapped in to form a pattern plus iron toe pieces and horseshoe iron heels.Leather protected by the coats of dubbin regularly applied-wax,oil and tallow to water- proof and soften.

      To make me chuckle with delight,he'd perform his party piece.Striking his heel on back kitchen stone flag floor,careful not to slip and slide; sparks in a shower- spit of tiny petal flames.

       Leather laces looped through eyelets.An old one saved,his fingers knotting and threading it through a conker,the hole bradawl bored.Oven baked for the playground championships.

        Marching along the road.The two of us playing at soldiers.Chest out.Shoulders back.Swing those arms.Left,right,left,right.His boots clicking out the rhythm.The Sargent major leading from the front.Left,right,left,right.Squaaaad halt.Stand at ease.Stand easy.

       Through the gate into Lower Orchard where cider apples grew on lichen coated branches bowed down by weight and age.Filling hessian sacks,stored overnight in the stone built primitive pig sty.Stacking them against tree trunks to be carted back to the pound house in the afternoon.

           Striding through lank tussocks,his legs a pair of geometrical dividers,his hob nails leaving indentations into which I placed my sandalled feet.Step out,pull up the other foot.In sunlight razor- sharp,the robin's autumn song serenading the footsteps of the follower as the two campaigners return to their base camp.

THE FARMHOUSE TREE.

Many years ago,more than I care to remember I was a little tacker on a North Devon farm in a little village called East Knowstone.The next village,a mile away...Knowstone,was known as "town" because it had a pub,church,chapel and a village shop.

      I called my farm THE FARMHOUSE TREE because it was as old as an oak tree and the rooms and outbuildings were the branches.No electricity.No mains drainage.No mains water.Water pumped up in back kitchen from a spring in Higher Orchard field,crystal clear and ice-cold.Brought to the farmhouse tree through hundreds of yards of lead pipe,laid in the early part of the 1900s.

    I lived in my farmhouse tree with my mum,dad,aged maiden aunt and two imaginary friends Jim and Derek.And of course the shire horse Charlie,the power behind the farm.I had a great life in a time which  has stayed with me ever since and which I now attempt to recapture in my writing for the local paper the WESTERN MORNING NEWS  which covers the whole of the South West of England.TOBE CONTINUED.....