1My
dad, ‘Pop,’ was a farmer. Mother, ‘Ma,’ was a townie. Pop’s dad
— ‘Poppa’
— was a farmer too. Before that I have no conscious information but believe
farming was a multi-generational endeavour in our family. Poppa took
his
family to Queensland, Australia in 1914, when Pop was 4 years old. He had
been promised ‘good’ farmland for next to nothing but, so the story goes, it
was irredeemable desert/scrub. Most of the family took sick with malaria,
ulcers in the legs and Heaven knows what. They returned to England more or
less penniless after only a few months.
2Meanwhile, my other grandfather — ‘Gramps’ — had emigrated to Canada in 1912. He booked his passage on the Titanic! At the last minute a friend said to him, ‘Why go on a fast, expensive ship when you could go on a slow, cheap ship and have twice the holiday for half the price?’ Realising this made sense, Gramps changed his booking. If he had not, who knows if I would be writing this story? It is one of those imponderables to which no answer seems readily available to us in this 3-dimensional realm of time and place, although I have no doubt that within the eternal scheme of things there is an obvious, logical answer. Not long afterwards my grandmother — ‘Gogs’ (don’t ask!) — followed him out and they married there. Ma was born in Vancouver in 1914 but when World War 1 broke out shortly afterwards they all returned to England. Gramps went to join up but the army medics failed him on health grounds, saying he would be dead within 6 months. They never explained why, and they could not have been further from the truth, as he ‘went home’ in 1974 aged 87, in spite of smoking 60 Capstan Full Strength cigarettes per day for decades. No doubt the human genome boffins would love to get hold of his genetic data to see what was ‘protecting’ him from cancer.
3Poppa was never able to afford to buy his own land after the Australia fiasco but he, with some of his brothers, took a tenancy on several farms within the Marquis of Camden’s Bayham Estate on the Kent/Sussex county border near Tunbridge Wells. There, he grew hops, grain, potatoes, linseed, milked a herd of Channel Island cows and bred horses. There may well have been other arable crops also grown and livestock kept, but I have no details of what they might have been.
4Pop grew up in this environment. He was worked hard from childhood, getting up at 4 am to milk the cows before school and doing whatever the season (and Poppa) required of him upon his return home at the end of the school day. He gained hard, broad, practical experience about virtually every aspect of farming as a result of this phase in his life.
5Ma and Pop married, I believe to the dismay of both sets of in-laws, in 1937. Ian was born in 1940, Michael in 1941 and after an ectopic pregnancy who would have been Valerie, I was born the day before D-Day, 1944. Another non-term pregnancy who would have been Peter followed me but I only found this out at Christmas 1993, a few months before Ma laid aside her body.
6Pop worked for his dad for several years after he and Ma were married but eventually took various jobs on other farming estates. In the late 1940’s he became manager of a mixed farm on Ashdown Forest in Sussex. There he kept a herd of Guernsey cows, raised pigs, geese, turkeys, hens, grew potatoes, maize, wheat, barley, linseed and various other crops. This is the environment in which I spent 7 years, from 5 to 12. My brothers and I had 7,000 acres of ‘backyard’ for us and our imaginations to run free – the farm plus all the rest of Ashdown Forest.
7We spent school holidays exploring the woods, the streams, the lakes and rivers, the wildlife. We shot grey squirrels with an air rifle and were paid a shilling for their tails as part of a government scheme to control this imported ravager of young tree plantations and other wooded areas. We collected birds’ eggs from the hedgerows, snared rabbits and deer that damaged the crops. At that time I had no real thought for the life of these creatures, until one day we visited the snares in the deer fence that demarked our land from that of the next door estate — whence, incidentally, the Winnie the Pooh stories emanated.
8It had been a good many weeks since we went there and the sight that greeted us left an indelible mark in my psyche. There were 2 deer snared. One had been dead for weeks and had rotted at least half away and no doubt also been partly eaten by foxes, crows and other scavengers. The other was a newer carcase and had not yet rotted, but the way they were both snared by the neck, helpless to escape, no doubt terrified as their struggles tightened the snare and strangled them, filled me with a profound and abiding sense that this was not ‘who I really am.’ It was a very distressing sight to a young boy not yet inured in the ‘Oh well, this is the way things are so I might as well accept it and adopt it also as my way’ attitude that prevails so widely in this world. I probably said little for fear of being thought a sissy but it has contributed greatly — along with numerous other observations over the years — to my perspective on the way humans inter-relate with animals — and other life forms — on planet Earth.
9During our time at Old Lodge Farm, as it was named, I had a number of experiences which I did not understand at the time but which I now see were ‘prophetic.’ One was a dream, which came over and over, on multiple occasions during our time there. In it, there was a tube, similar in shape and size to a toothpaste tube. The top was screwed on tightly. I knew, in some inner-knowing way, that if the top was ever unscrewed, the contents would get out and this would cause death and destruction wherever it went, and there would be little anyone could do to stop it. This caused me great concern in the dream.
10Needless to say, the top was unscrewed and out came a ‘worm’ of what looked to all intents and purposes like toothpaste. It kept coming and coming endlessly, mile after mile, ‘worming’ its way all over the countryside and all over the world, and everything it touched was contaminated, defiled or destroyed, whether plant, animal, soil or anything. It was unstoppable, and nobody was able to put the lid back on. At the age of about 6 or 8, I had no knowledge of Greek Mythology and had never heard of Pandora’s Box, but truly this was its equal, in tube form. In the early 1950s, the age of petrochemical agriculture (and petrochemical just-about-everything-else) had barely begun, and had as yet had little perceptible impact upon the environment. The intervening years have seen such pervasive contamination of and damage to the ecosphere of planet Earth by man-made molecules that many scientists and environmentalists believe we are on the brink of global catastrophe. Increasing numbers of ‘ordinary’ citizens, I amongst them, share that view, but those who have assumed authority over us in the form of the world’s governments are still being much too slow to listen and respond actively to the wishes of the people, even in — and perhaps especially — the so-called democracies.
11Nevertheless, there is much good news in this regard, for many environmentally-damaging chemicals have been withdrawn and this is prompting many new and environmentally-compatible approaches to crop-production and other endeavours of man. These are starting to come to the forefront of human awareness and this is showing signs of beginning to accelerate at an exponential rate.
12Another ‘inexplicable’ happening, which came from somewhere very deep within me, was an upwelling soul-awareness of the great, cosmic, universal, creative, intelligent energy, communing with me. This was intangible, invisible, but built up palpably inside me repeatedly every few months — over a period of several years — until I felt It was silently calling me, filling my every sense to the point where all else was subordinated by it. The only way I could satisfyingly respond to this calling was to go up into the woods away from all other human contact and reach upwards to the sky, not just physically with my arms but with my heart and soul, crying out to It to bring understanding of what this was all about, seeking to enter into a state of never-ending oneness with It.
13All things that were of the ‘Earth mind consciousness of humanity’ were impediments, somehow getting in the way of this communion, and I had to separate myself from them, including the very clothes on my body. I would stand there, ‘alone,’ naked, reaching out in body and soul, heart bursting for oneness, tears of wonderment, joy, love, longing pouring down my cheeks, calling out to this Universal Life Force that was invisibly embracing me, drawing me upwards into Itself, overwhelming me with Its Love that was far, far beyond the understanding of this pre-pubescent boy. Eventually — after perhaps half an hour, maybe more — the great, insatiable yearning inside me would slowly subside, if never fully, at least to a level where I could ‘rejoin the world’ of what I now realise is illusory, ‘consensus reality,’ until the whole process started and built up to a crescendo once more. I have no recollection of just how many times this took place, but it was numerous. It was only in later years, after I began to understand more about the eternal nature of the human spirit and its relationship with the ‘Creator Spirit’ that I have gradually come to know more of what this was all about. No doubt there is still more of which to become aware as my understanding of eternity continues to grow toward fullness of spiritual awakening.
***
14In the early 1950’s Pop received a visit from a ‘travelling salesman’ named Mike Butler. Mike was selling seaweed of all things! It was in 2 forms: one as a dried, milled meal, both for feeding to livestock and for spreading on the land as a soil improver, and the other in liquefied form for spraying onto the foliage of crops, to stimulate plant growth and health.
15Pop read Mike’s literature and was impressed with what it told him. He ordered some meal and some liquid. The meal improved the quality of the milk and the health of the cows. The liquid improved the growth and health of the crops, including pasture. The cows ate the pasture better and thrived better on it, which also led to more and better quality milk. Mike and Pop became friends and Mike said to him, ‘Look, Denis, you know farming; you have seen how good these products are. You would make a ‘natural’ salesman for them. Come and join me and we can really put this stuff on the map.’
16We left the farm in 1955 and moved into town. Within a few years Pop became the star salesman for the ‘Seaweed Agricultural’ business. I remember thinking at that time – the late 1950’s – ‘Whatever happens, I will never become a seaweed salesman.’ I was embarrassed to tell anyone of my peers what my dad did for a living.